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Lalanne. Le Pont des Arts et l'Institut 
Size of the original etching, S\s X 5V1- inches 



FRENCH ETCHERS OF THE 
SECOND EMPIRE 



WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY 



With Illustrations 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

The Riverside Press Cambridge 
1916 



minium 



•37 



COPYRIGHT, ipi I, BY FREDERICK KEPPEL & CO. 
COPYRIGHT, I913, 1914, AND I916, BY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published November iqib 




DEC 15 1916 

©CI.A453081 



n*$ 1 , 



TO 
FITZROY CARRINGTON 






% 



& 



ontentd 

Introduction xiii 

I. Meryon and Baudelaire 3 

II. Charles Meryon, Poet 18 

III. Maxime Lalanne 34 

IV. Some French Etchers and Sonneteers ... 41 

V. The Goncourts and their Circle .... 59 

VI. Some French Artists during the Siege and Com- 
mune 76 

VII. Corot as a Lithographer 95 



Joidt of cJlludtzatiotid 

Le Pont des Arts et l'Institut, by Maxime Lalanne 

Frontispiece ' 

Portrait of Charles Meryon, by Felix Bracquemond . 4 
Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, by Bracquemond . 4 
Frontispiece for Les Fleurs du Mai of Baudelaire, by 

Bracquemond 6' 

Le Pont au Change (with Balloon), by Meryon . . 8 " 
Le Pont au Change (with Birds), by Meryon . . 8 V 

Le Petit Pont, by Meryon 10' 

Portrait of Charles Meryon, by Leopold Flameng . 10 

Portrait of Charles Meryon (Head), by Bracquemond 18 

Verses to Zeeman (1854), by Meryon 20 ^ 

Old Gate of the Palais de Justice, by Meryon . . 22 v 

Le Stryge, by Meryon 22 " 

La Rue des Mauvais Garcons, by Meryon . . .24 

La Petite Pompe, by Meryon 24 

Le Pont-Neuf, by Meryon 24 

La Morgue, by Meryon 26 l 

L'Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris, by Meryon . .28^ 
Le Pilote de Tonga (1861), by Meryon . . . .28 

L'Attelage, by Meryon 30 

Le Haag — Poids de la Ville d'Amsterdam, by Lalanne 34 

ix 



Plage des Vaches Noires, Villers, by Lalanne . . 34 v 

Les Bords de la Tamise, by Lalanne 36' 

Rue des Marmousets, by Lalanne . , . . . . 36 l 

Bordeaux, Vue de Cenon, by Lalanne 38 ^ 

Nogent, by Lalanne 38 

Bordeaux, Quai des Chartrons, by Lalanne . . . 4CT 

Beuzeval, by Lalanne 40 

A Cusset, by Lalanne 40' 

Le Verger, by Daubigny 48^ 

L'Eclair, by Courtry (after Victor Hugo) 50 v 

Promenade hors des Murs, by Leys 50^ 

Une Grande Douleur, by Ribot 54v 

The Rookery, by Seymour Haden 56 v 

Fleur Exotique, by Manet 58^ 

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, by Gavarni . . .60^ 

"Gavarni" (Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier) . . . 66' 

Edmond de Goncourt, by Bracquemond . . . .70" 

Edmond de Goncourt, by Paul Helleu 74^ 

Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, by Regnault 78 " / " 

"La ville de Paris investie confie a l'air son appel 

a la France," byPuvis de Chavannes 80 v 

"Echappe a la serre ennemie le message attendu 
exalte le cozur de la fiere cite," by Puvis de 

Chavannes 80 ^ 

La Resistance, etched by Bracquemond from the statue in 

snow by Falguiere. 82 k 

La Republique, etched by Bracquemond from the bust in 

snow by Moulin 84 / 

X 



Avenue de Boulogne, by Lalanne 86 

From Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris 

La Mare d'Auteuil, by Lalanne 86 y 

From Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris 

Arms of the City of Paris, by Martial (Adolphe Mar- 
tial Potement ) 88 

La Colonne de la Place Vendome, by Martial . . 92 
From Paris sous la Commune 

Le Clocher de St. Nicolas-Lez-Arras, by Corot . . 96 ' 

Le Dormoir des Vaches, by Corot 98^ 

Le Moulin de Cuincy, by Corot 100 

Le Repos des Philosophes, by Corot 102 v ' 

Le Coup de Vent, by Corot 102" 

Saules et Peupliers Blancs, by Corot .... 104^ 

Souvenir d'Italie, by Corot 104 " 




cJtitzod actio txo 

>HESE studies appeared originally in The 
Print-Collector's Quarterly, and are here re- 
printed with few changes. Though not- 
planned as a series, they derive a certain 
unity from the fact that all deal with a group of 
French graphic artists, mainly etchers, viewed against 
the background of French life and letters under the 
Second Empire. 

It is a method that lends itself to the treatment of this 
period. About 1860, etching, which had been revived 
by the "Men of 1830," began to attain a wider popular- 
ity (partly as a result of cross-channel influences), and 
to no class did it make a more definite and decided ap- 
peal than to the poets and men of letters. Baudelaire, 
with Philippe Burty, was among the very first to esti- 
mate at its real worth the strange, arresting genius of 
Charles Meryon, and there is still perhaps no more pre- 
cise or penetrating statement of the very spirit of etch- 
ing than is to be found in the brief articles to which 
reference is so often made in the following pages. 

The Goncourts had many friends and acquaintances 
among contemporary etchers, including Bracquemond, 
who instructed them in the principles of the art, as 
Maxime Lalanne instructed Victor Hugo. The latter, 
however, unlike Jules de Goncourt, made slight use of 
the knowledge he thus acquired in his exile on the is- 



land of Guernsey. This is, in a way, surprising. For, as 
M. Emile Berteaux says in his admirable monograph on 
Victor Hugo as an artist, acid or soft ground etching was 
marvellously adapted to the translating of those violent 
" effects" that the poet himself confessed he obtained 
by using the barb of his pen as freely as the point. 

"But, after a few attempts, he stopped. The writer 
threw away the needle which threatened to make him 
forget his pen. He did not wish to give the lie to the 
words that Gautier had written some years earlier, in 
presenting the drawings of his illustrious friend as a 
'simple recreation': 'Ce n'est pas trop de tout un 
homme pour un art.'" 

A number of Hugo's drawings were, however, exe- 
cuted by other hands. One was the striking evocation 
of a city in ruins called V Eclair, which was etched by 
Charles Courtry for Sonnets et Eaux-fortes, and which is 
here reproduced in connection with the article on that 
significant, if not particularly inspired, volume. Another 
was a sketch whose origin makes it of special interest to 
Americans. In 1859, Hugo, moved by the hopeless but 
heroic exploit of John Brown, wrote a vigorous letter 
to the United States Government, protesting against 
his execution, and prophesying the evil consequences 
that would result from such an act of repression. "At 
the same time," to quote once more from M. Ber- 
teaux, "thinking of the waiting gallows, he drew several 
silhouettes of men that had been hanged — funereal 
shades blacker than the night, a ray of light descending 
towards them." 

The most somber and vigorous of these drawings he 
gave to his brother-in-law, Paul Chenay, who executed 
in a few days "a beautiful plate in mezzotint." Un- 



fortunately, however, Hugo, struck by the correspond- 
ence between the date of John Brown's capture, and 
that of the imperial coup aVetat, had inscribed at the 
bottom of his drawing the two words: "Deux Decem- 
bre." As a result, the proofs (with a single exception) 
were confiscated and destroyed at the printer's. The 
plate seemed destined never to see the light. But several 
months later a new ministry removed the interdict, and 
prints were circulated, though without the seditious le- 
gend. Hugo was so pleased with Chenay's work in this 
instance that he gave him some of his other drawings to 
execute, and an album containing them appeared in 1863 
with a preface by Gautier. 

One of Hugo's friends was the romantic etcher, Celes- 
tin Nanteuil, with whom he once traveled through "Old 
France," collecting sketches and impressions of Gothic 
architecture. Both were strongly influenced by Piranesi, 
whose great plates of Roman antiquities, impregnated 
with his own spirit of the past, had recently been repub- 
lished in Paris, and who was largely responsible for the 
spread of a romantic, or "expressive," style of architec- 
tural treatment. Even Meryon, so unlike either Nan- 
teuil or Hugo, did not escape this current tendency, 
though curiously enough his immediate master was not 
the imaginative, melodramatic Piranesi, but the realis- 
tic, matter-of-fact Dutch etcher, Reynier Nooms, or 
Zeeman. 

Meryon, who thus combines its two strongly contrast- 
ing schools or tendencies, represents the culmination of 
modern French etching, as well as its highest individual 
accomplishment. The period following the publication 
of his Eaux-fortes sur Paris is, on the whole, in spite of 
its technical triumphs and rapidly spreading popularity, 



one of gradual decline until, as we see in Sonnets et Eaux- 
fortes, and in the later work of Lalanne, the etched plate 
comes to be regarded for the most part merely as a 
superior sort of illustrative and reproductive medium. 
As such it seemed doomed when the invention of the 
photogravure process made possible an enormous in- 
crease in the production of "prints" — particularly for 
the embellishment of books — at a corresponding reduc- 
tion of cost. As a matter of fact, however, this very 
release from alien requirements imposed upon it from 
the outside, has proved a powerful stimulus to a second 
revival of etching, in our own day. In this respect its for- 
tunes present a curiously close parallel to those of wood- 
engraving, which at first threatened to disappear en- 
tirely when displaced by the halftone, but which is 
steadily reasserting itself as a medium of original ex- 
pression. It is interesting to note that the artist, Au- 
guste Lepere, who has done more than any one else in 
France to reestablish wood-engraving on a proper basis 
of independence, is also one of those who have most 
notably renewed the great tradition of landscape and 
architectural etching in that country. With Lepere and 
his contemporaries, however, we are no longer among 
the etchers of the Second Empire, but have long since 
reached those of the Third Republic. 

W. A. Bradley. 

Bailey's Island, Maine, 
July, 1916. 



cj tench (jtchetd of the 
&econ J Smpize 




a tench ijtchetd of the 
(Brecon a ompite 

I 

MERYON AND BAUDELAIRE 

[LL French poets of the middle part of the 
nineteenth century were interested, theoreti- 
cally at least, in painting and the graphic 
arts generally. From Theophile Gautier, 
godfather of Parnassianism, who reserved for his prose 
the full resources of his superb Turneresque palette, 
to the young Verlaine, author of Fetes Galantes and 
Poemes Saturniens, pictorial preoccupations were, on the 
the whole, paramount. Charles Baudelaire almost alone 
appears, in part, an exception to this rule; but if, in his 
work, the purely visual element is less predominant than 
in that of most of his contemporaries — if the images of 
sight yield there in number and in clear evocative power 
to those of sound and of scent, thereby preluding the 
way for a new poetic dispensation — he nevertheless fits 
into the late Romantic tradition, if only by reason of his 
keen aesthetic appreciation of the arts of design, and of 
his association, as a disinterested friend or sympathetic 
critic, with many of the most illustrious artists of the 
age. Himself a rebel and an outlaw in the domain of 
orthodox taste, though with a distinct tinge of the tradi- 



tional, he was especially drawn to the insurgent leader, 
like Delacroix, his championship of whom is as famous 
as his espousal of the cause of Wagner's music in Paris, 
or to the solitary attarde of Romanticism who, like Con- 
stantin Guys, worked out his own salvation in his own 
way. It is not that he did not welcome new movements 
in all their collectivity of talents and temperaments; but 
these, to find favor with him, must be vouched for by 
unmistakable evidences of creative vigor and original- 
ity in the individual artists, not merely by pretentious 
dogmas or plausible theories. Intellectual distinctions 
counted but little with him in matters of art, and a new 
way of rendering what was actually seen or felt seemed 
to him of infinitely more importance than any merely 
academic discussion as to what an artist should or 
should not look for, deliberately, in order to put it into 
or leave it out of his pictures. 

Thus it was that while he shrugged his shoulders at 
the realists who were not really observers, he turned an 
attentive eye to the work of the group of young painter- 
etchers who, about 1859, were beginning to attract at- 
tention in the salons. Baudelaire thought highly of 
etching because it afforded an opportunity for "the 
most clean-cut possible translation of the character of 
the artist," and he was attracted to those who were en- 
gaged in reviving this almost obsolete medium, because 
they gave clear proof in their work of that personal 
force and distinction which he valued above all else, and 
which he was always on the alert to discover in the pro- 
ductions of the new and the unknown. 

In his article, Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, included in 
the volume of his collected works entitled L'Art Ro- 
mantique, Baudelaire mentions the following etchers as 




Portrait of Charles Meryon 

From the etching by Felix Bracquemond, done in 1853 

Size of the original etching, 8"ic X 6Vs inches 




Portrait of Charles Baudelaire 

From the etching by Felix Bracquemond. Of the same size as the 
original etching. Evidently an excellent likeness, since it exactly 
renders that ecclesiastical aspect of the poet which made one of 
his friends compare him to a cardinal. 



among those through whose efforts the medium was to 
recover its ancient vitality: Seymour Haden. Manet, 
Legros, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Meryon, Millet, Dau- 
bigny, Saint-Marcel, Jacquemart, and Whistler. With 
at least two of these, on the evidence of his published 
correspondence, 1 he had personal relations: Bracque- 
mond and Meryon. The name of the former occurs fre- 
quently in the letters with reference to a device which 
Baudelaire wished to adopt as a frontispiece to the sec- 
ond edition of Fleurs du Mai. The idea of this device 
came to him, as he writes to Felix Nadar (May 16, 1859), 
while turning the leaves of the Histoire des Danses Ma- 
cabres, by Hyacinthe Langlois. It was to be "an arbor- 
escent skeleton, the legs and the ribs forming the trunk, 
the arms extended in the form of a cross breaking into 
leaf and shoot, and protecting several rows of poisonous 
plants arranged in rising tiers of pots, as in a green- 
house." In casting about for an artist to execute this 
design, Baudelaire mentions and dismisses Dore, Pen- 
guilly — whom he afterward wished he had taken — 
and Celestin Nanteuil. Finally, perhaps at the instance 
of his publisher, Poulet-Malassis, he chose Bracque- 
mond, — a most unhappy selection as it turned out, for 
that artist was either unable or unwilling to grasp the 
poet's conception, and the plate which he etched for this 
purpose was not used. A few proofs were pulled, how- 
ever, and impressions in both the first and second states 
of the plate are now in the Samuel P. Avery collection in 
the New York Public Library. 

Baudelaire's negotiations with the " terrible Bracque- 
mond," as he came to call him, were carried on for 
the most part through Poulet-Malassis, which perhaps 

1 Charles Baudelaire: Lettres, 1841-1866. Paris, 1907. 
5 



affords a partial explanation of the misunderstanding 
concerning the Macabre frontispiece. And, although he 
speaks in one letter of having met the artist and repeated 
verbally the instructions which he had already given, 
with characteristically minute attention to detail, in 
writing, no such special interest attaches to this meet- 
ing, by no means unique, as to that between Baudelaire 
and Meryon which occurred about the same time, and 
to which we owe one of the most vivid and fantastic pre- 
sentments we possess of that mad genius. In his Salon 
de 1859, Baudelaire had written of Meryon with an en- 
thusiasm which awoke a responsive reverberation in the 
breast of Victor Hugo. 

" Since you know M. Meryon," the latter wrote to 
Baudelaire (April 29, 1860), "tell him that his splendid 
etchings have dazzled me. Without color, with nothing 
save shadow and light, chiaroscuro pure and simple and 
left to itself: that is the problem of etching. M. Meryon 
solves it magisterially. What he does is superb. His 
plates live, radiate, and think. He is worthy of the pro- 
found and luminous page with which he has inspired 
you." 

This page, which Baudelaire afterward incorporated 
in his Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, where he speaks further 
of Meryon as "the true type of the accomplished aqua- 
fortiste," and praises the famous perspective of San 
Francisco as his masterpiece, does, indeed, betray the 
subtle penetration of the poet into the very spirit of his 
fellow-artist: "By the severity, the delicacy, and the 
certitude of his design, M. Meryon recalls what is best in 
the old aqua-fortistes. I have rarely seen represented 
with more poetry the natural solemnity of a great capi- 
tal. The majesties of accumulated stone, the spires point- 




Bracquemond. Frontispiece for "LesFleurs du Mal" of Baudelaire 

The seven plants symbolize the Seven Deadly Sins, and the outstretched 
arms of the skeleton will support, later, the Fruits of Evil. . This romantic 
and remarkable frontispiece was never used. Baudelaire criticized the draw- 
ing of the skeleton severely, as well as the spirit and arrangement ot the wUoie 
design. 

Size of the original etching, 6% X ^/ig inches 



ing a finger to the skies, the obelisks of industry vomiting 
their thick clouds of smoke heavenward, the prodigious 
scaffoldings of monuments under repair, relieved against 
the solid mass of architecture, their tracery of a filmy 
and paradoxical beauty, the misty sky charged with 
wrath and with rancor, the depths of the perspectives 
augmented by the thought of the dramas contained 
therein, — none of the complex elements of which the 
dolorous and glorious setting of civilization is composed 
is here forgotten." 

Grateful for such recognition on the part of a dis- 
tinguished man of letters who was also accepted as one 
of the leading art critics of the day in Paris, Meryon evi- 
dently wrote to Baudelaire, thanking him and asking 
permission to call; for in his letter of January 8, 1860, to 
Poulet-Malassis, the poet writes as follows : — ■ 

"What I write to-night/' he begins, "is worth the 
trouble of writing: M. Meryon has sent me his card, and 
we have met. He said to me: You live in a hotel whose 
name must have attracted you because of the relation it 
bears, I presume, to your tastes. — Then I looked at the 
envelope of his letter. On it was 'Hotel de Thebes/ and 
yet his letter reached me." 

It is necessary to interrupt the letter at this point to 
explain what is obscure in the foregoing allusion for one 
not familiar with Baudelaire's haunts and homes in 
Paris. He was living at this time, not in the Hotel Pimo- 
dan where he dwelt so long, and where he held those 
famous meetings described by Gautier in his introduc- 
tory essay to Fleurs du Mai, but in modest quarters in 
the Hotel de Dieppe, 22, rue d'Amsterdam, whose prin- 
cipal advantage was its proximity to the Gare de l'Ouest, 
whence he took the train for Honfleur on his frequent 



visits to his mother. Thus, through a bizarre confusion 
between the two words, Dieppe and Thebes, is explained 
Meryon's curious mistake in addressing his letter to 
Baudelaire. 

The poet proceeds with the following report of their 
conversation: "In one of his great plates, 1 he [Meryon] 
has substituted for a little balloon a flight of birds of 
prey, and, when I remarked to him that it was lacking in 
verisimilitude to put so many eagles into a Parisian sky, 
he replied that what he had done was not devoid of 
foundation in fact, since ces gens-la [the imperial govern- 
ment] had often released eagles so as to study the pres- 
ages, according to the rite, — and that this had been 
printed in the newspapers, even in Le Moniteur. 

"I must tell you that he makes no attempt to conceal 
his respect for all superstitions, but he explains them 
badly, and he sees cabalistic mysteries everywhere. 

"He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his 
plates, that the shadows cast by one of the masonry 
constructions of the Pont-Neuf 2 on the lateral wall of 
the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx; 
that this had been, on his part, quite involuntary, and 
that he had only remarked the singularity later, on re- 
calling that this design had been made a short time be- 
fore the coup d'etat. But the Prince is the real person 
who, by his acts and his visage, bears the closest re- 
semblance to a sphinx. 

"He asked me if I had read the tales of a certain 
Edgar Poe. I answered that I knew them better than 
any one else, and for a good reason. He then asked me 
in a very emphatic manner, if I believed in the reality of 

1 The Pont-au-Change. 

2 An error of Baudelaire's. The plate is the Petit-Pont. 

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this Edgar Poe. I naturally asked him to whom he at- 
tributed all his tales. He replied: l To a syndicate of men 
of letters who are very clever, very powerful, and who are in 
touch with everything.' And here is one of his reasons: 
' The Rue Morgue. I have made a design of the Morgue. 
■ — An Orang-outang. I have often been compared to a 
monkey. — This monkey murders two women, a mother 
and her daughter. I also have morally assassinated two 
women, a mother and her daughter. — / have always 
taken the story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You 
wotdd be doing me a great favor if you could find out for me 
the date when Edgar Poe, supposing that he was not helped 
by any one, composed this story, so that I could see if the 
date coincided with my adventures. } 

"He spoke to me, with admiration, of Michelet's 
book on Jeanne d 'Arc, but he is convinced that this 
book is not by Michelet. 

"One of his great preoccupations is cabalistical 
science, but he interprets it in a strange fashion that 
would make a cabalist laugh. 

"Do not laugh at all this with mechants bougres. 
For nothing in the world would I wish to injure a man 
of talent. . . . 

"After he left me, I asked myself how it happened 
that I, who have always had, in my mind and in my 
nerves, all that was needed to make me mad, had not 
become so. Seriously, I addressed to heaven the 
thanksgivings of the Pharisee." 

It is not surprising that Baudelaire should have 
been somewhat disconcerted by this interview which 
confirmed so strikingly the reports of the mental 
malady of his visitor to which he had alluded in his 



Salon de 1859, and that he should soon have sought, 
after some brief intercourse, to avoid personal and 
private encounters which might have proved embar- 
rassing. He gave notice in ways the artist could not 
long mistake, that he did not wish to continue the 
acquaintance on a footing of intimacy; though, as 
Crepet, in his Charles Baudelaire l points out, he by no 
means ceased to interest himself in the artist, several 
sets of whose Eaux-Fortes sur Paris he was instrumental, 
with one or two other admirers of Meryon, in having 
purchased by the Ministry. Poor Meryon! With an 
incomplete realization of his own condition, which ren- 
dered him incapable of divining the real truth, he felt he 
had offended Baudelaire in some way, and finally ad- 
dressed him the following appeal, tragic in its note of 
noble and unconscious pathos : — 

"Dear Sir: I called on you yesterday evening at the 
Hotel de Dieppe. I was informed that you had 
changed your domicile. I wished, above all, to see 
you, in order to learn from your own lips that you 
were not angry with me, for I do not think I have 
ever done anything to you which could serve as a mo- 
tive for your change of manner toward me. Only, as 
the last letter which I wrote you has remained unan- 
swered, and as three times I have left my name at 
your dwelling without my having had the slightest 
word from you, I am entitled to believe that you have 
some reason for breaking with me. I did not remind 
you of your promise to write a newspaper article 
about my work, because, quite frankly, I was sure that 

1 Charles Baudelaire, fitude biographique d' 'Eugene Crepet revue et 
mise au jour par Jacques Crepet. Paris, 1907. 

10 




Meryon. Le Petit Pont 

" He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his plates, that the shadows 
cast by one of the masonry constructions of the Pont-Neuf on the lateral 
wall of the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx; that this had 
been, on his part, quite involuntary, and that he had only remarked this singu- 
larity later, on recalling that this design had been made a short time before 
the coup d'etat." 

Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8, 1860). 

Size of the original etching, 9% X 7*4 inches 










0> -C -is 

ast 

J$£ o d 
3^§1 



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o a £3^ 



you could make much better employment of your time 
and of your literary skill. My etchings are known to 
nearly all whom they could interest and rather too 
much good has been said of them. As to the interrup- 
tion of our relations, which have been but of brief 
duration and of slight importance, I agree to this 
without a word if such is your desire, and I shall con- 
serve, none the less, the recollection of the eminent 
services you have rendered me in coming to see me, 
and in occupying yourself with me at a time when I 
was utterly destitute. 

"I have forwarded to M. Lavielle, whom I had the 
advantage of meeting once with you, the set of my 
views, reworked and a trifle modified; he has, per- 
haps, shown them to you. I have had difficulty in 
procuring the ten sets of them (the printer being very 
busy at that time) that I have disposed of, with suffi- 
cient rapidity. I have no longer any left and I have 
destroyed the Petit-Pont, which I propose to engrave 
anew, after I have made in it some rather important 
corrections. 

" Adieu, dear sir, with all possible good wishes. 
"I am your sincere and devoted friend, 

"C. Meryon. 

"20, rue Duperre." 

The letter to which Meryon refers in the opening 
paragraph of the foregoing as having remained unan- 
swered by Baudelaire is doubtless that bearing the 
date of February 23, 1860, which is the only other one 
given by Crepet in the appendix to his volume. This 
is it : — 



n 



11 Dear Sir: I send you a set of my ' Views of Paris.' x 
As you can see, they are well printed, on Chinese 
tissue mounted on laid paper, and consequently de 
bonne tenue. It is on my part a feeble means of rec- 
ognizing the devotion you have shown on my behalf. 
However, I dare hope that they will serve sometimes 
to fix your imagination, curious of the things of the 
past. I myself, who made them at an epoch, it is true, 
when my naive heart was still seized with sudden 
aspirations toward a happiness which I believed I 
could attain, look over some of these pieces with a 
veritable pleasure. They may, then, be able to pro- 
duce nearly the same effect upon you who also love to 
dream. 

"I have not yet terminated the notes that I prom- 
ised to make in order to aid you in your work; at all 
events, I shall go to see you soon to discuss the matter 
with you further. As the publisher recoils before the 
steps which would still have to be taken, he says, for 
the placing of these prints, there is nothing pressing 
about the affair. Thus, do not let this disturb you. 

" Adieu, monsieur; I hope that before your depar- 
ture, I shall be able to profit by the kindly reception 
that I have received from you. 

"I am your very humble and very devoted ser- 
vant. 

"I am going to try to place sets with those persons 

1 Baudelaire had already tried to obtain a set of these prints. 
In writing to Charles Asselineau (February 20, 1859) he com- 
missions his friend to get from fidouard Houssaye ' ' all the en- 
gravings of Meryon (views of Paris), good proofs on Chinese 
paper. Pour parer noire chambre, as Dorine says." He was not 
successful, however, at that time. In quoting Moliere, Baude- 
laire refers to Toinette's speech in Le Malade Imaginaire (Act II, 
sc. vi). 

12 



who have been so good, on your recommendation, as 
to interest themselves in this work. 

"Meryon. 

"20, rue Duperre." 

This letter renders sufficiently clear the kind of serv- 
ice Baudelaire had rendered Meryon over and above 
the public praise contained in his writings. What, at 
the first glance, is less certain, is the work on which 
the poet was engaged at this time and for which 
Meryon, on his own testimony, had promised to assist 
him with notes. In a footnote to this letter, M. Jacques 
Crepet states that it was " doubtless Ueau-forte est a 
la mode, an anonymous article published by the Re- 
vue anecdotique in the latter half of April, 1862." 
Personally, I doubt the correctness of this conjecture. 
One has but to turn to Baudelaire's letters of the 
period to see that there was then under discussion 
another piece of work for which Meryon would have 
been much more likely to give assistance in the form 
of notes, since it directly concerned himself. Indeed, 
the matter almost amounted to a project of collabora- 
tion between Meryon and Baudelaire. The publisher 
Delatre had promised to bring out an album of the 
Vues de Paris, and had asked the poet to prepare 
some text for the plates. The first reference to this 
tentative undertaking occurs in Baudelaire's letter of 
February 16, 1860 (just a week before Meryon's), to 
Poulet-Malassis : — 

" And then Meryon!" — he broaches the matter ab- 
ruptly, after having expressed his impatience at the 
attitude of two other artists, Champfleury and Du- 
ranty, friends of his, toward Constantin Guys, and at 

13 



a certain note of pedantry and dogmatism that was 
stealing into art under the influence and sanction of 
"realism" — "And then Meryon! Oh, as for him, it 
is intolerable. Delatre asks me to write some text for 
the album. Good! there is an occasion to write some 
reveries — ten lines, twenty or thirty lines — on beauti- 
ful engravings, the philosophical reveries of a Parisian 
flaneur. But Meryon, whose idea is different, objects. 
I am to say: on the right you see this; on the left you 
see that. I must say: here originally there were twelve 
windows, reduced to six by the artist, and finally I 
must go to the Hotel de Ville to find out the exact 
epoch of the demolitions. M. Meryon talks, his eyes 
fixed on the ceiling, and without listening to any ob- 
servation." 

Thus it was historical and antiquarian notes that, 
in all probability, Meryon had promised to jot down 
to facilitate the composition of a running commentary 
on the etchings. Meryon's reference to the reluctance 
of the publisher in the very same paragraph in which 
he speaks of these notes, serves to remove the least 
doubt as to what is meant. When he tells Baudelaire 
not to be disturbed, it is clearly as to the time at his 
disposal for the preparation of his text. Baudelaire, 
however, seems to have been less concerned about his 
own share in the work than about the fate of the 
project as a whole. Evidently he was not satisfied 
at the prospects of the work with Delatre, for, on 
March 9, 1860, he wrote in a postscript to Poulet- 
Malassis : — 

"I turn my letter, to ask you, very seriously, if it 
would not be advisable for you to be the publisher of 
Meryon's album (which will be augmented) and for 

14 



which I am to write the text. You know that, unfor- 
tunately, this text will not be in accordance with my 
wishes. 

"I warn you that I have made overtures to the 
house of Gide. . . . 

"This Meryon does not know how to go about 
things; he knows nothing of life. He does not know 
how to sell; he does not know how to find a publisher. 
His work is readily salable." 

And again, on March 13, he writes, in response to 
some proposition from his friend : — 

"Concerning Meryon, do you mean by buying the 
plates to buy the metal plates, or rather the right of 
selling an indefinite number of proofs from them? I 
can conceive that you fear the conversations with 
Meryon. You should carry on the negotiations by 
letter (20, rue Duperre). I warn you that Meryon's 
great fear is lest the publisher should change the 
format and the paper. . . . What you say to me of 
Meryon does not affect what I write to you concerning 
him." 

The excellent business sense, the note of prudence 
and painstaking, that comes out in all this correspon- 
dence on the part of Baudelaire, and which is scarcely 
less notable than his unwearied devotion to the inter- 
ests of his friends, ought to go far toward discoun- 
tenancing the theory that a poet cannot be a good 
man of affairs. Still again he writes on the same 
subject, with recapitulations of what he had said be- 
fore, to the same correspondent : — 

"I am very much embarrassed, mon cher, to reply 
to you in regard to the Meryon affair. I have no rights 
in the matter whatsoever; M. Meryon has repulsed, 

15 



with a species of horror, the idea of a text composed 
of a dozen little poems or sonnets; he has refused 
the idea of poetic meditations in prose. So as not to 
wound him, I have promised to write for him, in re- 
turn for three copies with the good proofs, a text in 
the style of a guide or manual, unsigned. It is, there- 
fore, with him alone that you will have to treat. . . . 
The thing has presented itself to my mind very sim- 
ply. On one side, an unfortunate madman, who does 
not know how to conduct his affairs, and who has 
executed a beautiful work; on the other, you, on 
whose list I want to see the best books possible. As 
the journalists say, I have considered for you the 
double pleasure of a good bit of business and of a good 
act." And he compares Meryon's case with that of 
Daumier, then without a publisher, to wind whom up, 
"like a clock," would also, he tells Poulet-Malassis, be 
"a great and good bit of business." 

This is the last reference in any of the letters to 
Meryon, or to the album, for which Baudelaire never 
wrote his text, since no publisher was willing to pub- 
lish the work. Had Poulet-Malassis not failed in 1861, 
it might have appeared, and then, in spite of the re- 
strictions imposed upon the restive spirit of the poet, 
we might have had in Baudelaire's text some literary 
equivalent of Meryon's etchings. How sympathetic 
this would have been, is shown by the descriptive and 
interpretative passage from the Salon de 1859 already 
quoted, which, in a few sentences, completely defines 
the form of Meryon's imaginative genius, and reveals 
the inmost source of its power to stir the emotions. 

There was, indeed, much that was common to the 
genius of Meryon and of Baudelaire. The work of 



both was profoundly personal, and in both a power- 
ful and somber imagination was tinged with a subtle 
fantasy supplied by a morbid exaggeration in the 
senses, which did not, however, preclude an intense 
and ardent preoccupation with formal perfection. 

On the contrary, these two modern detraques pre- 
sent in their work a solidity of construction and an 
absolute rectitude in the rendering of their moods 
and dreams, that is scarcely to be found in the work 
of even their best-balanced and sanest contempo- 
raries. The art of Baudelaire has been compared to 
that of Racine, and, in the same way, Meryon's de- 
sign has the complete economy and control of Robert 
Nanteuil or of Callot. Men like these make us doubt 
and reconsider our stock distinctions of " romantic" 
and " classic." The work of Meryon and of Baude- 
laire answers equally to both descriptions, and as- 
sures them a place apart in their generation. Thus, 
while their paths crossed but for a moment, and while 
they never shared with each other their secret thoughts 
and aspirations, there is, nevertheless, no small in- 
terest for the student in these slight and fragmentary 
records of what, had it not been for a cruel freak 
of fate, might have proved an enduring and fruitful 
friendship. 




II 

CHARLES MERYON, POET 

HE reader will recall a project for collabora- 
tion between Meryon and Baudelaire, pro- 
posed by the publisher, Delatre. This came 
to naught, as plans for the album containing 
the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, for which Baudelaire was 
to write a prose accompaniment, fell through. But the 
suggestion at least serves to remind us that, when he 
originally published his etchings at his own expense, 
Meryon himself provided a partial accompaniment 
for the work in the form of little poems which he 
etched on separate copper plates and in his own 
handwriting. A few of the shorter poems were even 
placed directly upon the etchings themselves, where 
they appear in one or more states. Would Meryon have 
discarded these verses from the new album, and were 
Baudelaire's remarks intended entirely to supersede 
them as more formal and edifying? In certain cases 
they had already been rendered obsolete by changes 
in the plates which destroyed the point of the verses; 
or, as in the case of Le Pont-Neuf and Le Stryge, they 
had been effaced from the copper in later re workings. 
And yet we know from Meryon 's manuscript notes 
entitled Mes Observations, on the article by his friend 
Philippe Burty in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, as well 
as from numerous variants in existing proofs, that he 

18 







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Portrait of Charles Meryon 
From the etching by Felix Bracquemond 
This is the portrait which Meryon himself preferred 
Size of the original etching, 4.% X 3V 2 inches 



devoted no little time and attention to these verses 
in the attempt to perfect their form and diction. It 
would thus seem as if Meryon, at one period of his 
career at least, took his role of poet with some serious- 
ness. It may strike one as remarkable that an artist 
who had expressed himself so completely in his chosen 
medium should have sought another outlet. But 
Meryon's mind was wholly absorbed by his subject- 
matter. His selection of Paris with its monuments was 
by no means a casual one, dictated merely by a sense 
of the picturesque and by the promise of profit from 
such an undertaking. For him, perhaps more than for 
any other artist who has ever lived, save perhaps the 
Russian novelist Dostoieffsky, cities had an inward 
significance, a soul. It was this that attracted him and 
that he strove to interpret beneath the material con- 
structions of bricks and stone; and as his imagination 
was of the intellectual, brooding order, his work has, 
in the words of Burty, a portee philosophique which 
renders any successful imitation of it impossible. 

This philosophical intention of the artist Meryon 's 
poems tend to prolong and, in some instances, to render 
more explicit. Often mere jeux d' esprit, their very play- 
fulness touches the chords of life and death with a kind 
of macabre and ironic humor, stirring an uneasy sense 
of the mystery of good and evil. In the longer and more 
serious poems, the lines throb with a passion of pity 
and tenderness for suffering mankind. This is height- 
ened and intensified by the poet's wistful contemplation 
of his own destiny when, like a child, he dreams of the 
future, gazing on the stars and seeking, in his own artless 
way, to solve the enigma of life after his first experience 
of pain and sorrow. A distinct autobiographic interest 



attaches to these poems which not only mirror his emo- 
tional moods, but reflect some of the outward vicissi- 
tudes of his adventurous and unhappy life. 

Of particular interest from every point of view 
is the dedication of Eaux-Fortes sur Paris to the 
seventeenth-century Dutch etcher, Reynier Nooms, 
better known as Zeeman, who was one of Meryon's 
most important masters in the art of the needle, and 
several of whose plates he carefully copied before 
attempting any original work. But to seize the full 
significance of this dedicatory poem and its peculiar 
appropriateness in the present instance, one must also 
bear in mind Meryon's own maritime experience as 
an officer in the French navy, as well as the fact that 
Zeeman himself had etched some views of Paris archi- 
tecture. The reference in the last stanza but one 
seems to indicate how direct was the influence of these 
upon Meryon in his style of treatment. Indeed, it 
may very well be that Meryon received from them 
not only the elements of his somewhat severe and 
graver-like technique, but the original suggestion, even, 
for his great undertaking. 

You who sailors grave! 

Whose callous hand could capture 

In a kind of rapture, 

And so simply tell 

All that weaves the spell 

Of the sea and wave. 

Let me tell thee, sire, 

How I do admire 

What subtly shows to me 

The sailor soul in thee. 

In all your work, no less, 
How each trait doth aver 
The skilful mariner 
So simple in address. 
20 



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Meryon. Verses to Zeeman (1854) 
Size of the original etching, 6% X 2% inches 



If Reason did not check 
My fancy, wont to roam, 
I half the time should find 
Your paper wet with foam, 
And then along the wind 
Should scent the tarry deck. 

In some new age may I, 
As through thy waters slipping, 
Once more thy shores descry, 
Thy ocean and thy shipping; 
That on the plate well laid, 
With keen point I may trace, 
By acid's mordant aid, 
All, in my thought's vast space, 
I see that 's good and great 
In the salt brine of the sea; 
And thou, dear captain and mate 
Wilt offer thy hand to me! 

Of this first work and new, 
Where I have Paris shown, 
— A ship adorns her banner — 
And tried to make my own 
My master's simple manner, 
Accept the homage due! 

My master and man of the sea, 
Reynier, thou whom I love 
Like another part of me, 
May I see thee soon above! 

As a frontispiece for the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, 
Meryon presented a picture, fantastically surmounted 
by the figure of a devil, of the old entrance to the 
Palais de Justice. To face this, he wrote a short poem 
in the second etched state of which occurs a variant 
through the substitution of the word "gemisse" for 
"rougisse," in the first line. I have incorporated both 
readings in my translation : — 

21 



Though pure souls blush and groan, 

For frontispiece I 've shown 

This sooty devilkin, 

Malicious, full of sin, 

Who shadows with his wings 

The old twin towers of kings, 

Of Paris, pleasant town, 

Paris, of fair renown, 

Which love and laughter crown — 

Where science, mighty rede 

Of diabolic breed, 

Full many a cub doth hatch 

That Demons claw and scratch! 

The wicked animal 

Who brought about our fall, 

Has chosen, far from well, 

In our good town to dwell. 

The case is truly grave, 

And sadly I engrave, 

Because, to rid the town, 

We needs must — tear it down. . . . 

For the Stryge, the first capital plate in the portfolio, 
Meryon supplied but the two following lines, which 
might, however, serve as a motto for the work as a 
whole : — 

Lust, a foul vampire, insatiable and lewd, 
Fore'er o'er the great city, covets its obscene food. 

Even this brief inscription, which was traced di- 
rectly beneath the etching, appears in only one state. 
Yet nothing could better sum up the saturnine philos- 
ophy of this mystic medieval dreamer, for whom the 
monster thus described stood as the symbol of that 
spirit of sin and suffering which corrupted the soul of 
the town he loved and hated with a singular intensity 
of evil fascination. 

The same sentiment is more concretely and hu- 
22 




tte -£-3-0.»^ 



Meryon. Old Gate of the Palais de Justice 
The frontispiece for "Eaux-Fortes sur Paris" 
Size of the original etching, 3% X 3 5 /i 6 inches 




Meryon. Le Stryge 
Size of the original etching, 6^4 X 5y 8 inches 



manly expressed in the verses at the top of the third 
state of La Rue des Mauvais Gargons: — 

What mortal once did dwell 

In such a dark abode? 
Who there did hide him well 

Where the sun's rays never showed? 

Was it Virtue here did stay, 

Virtue, silent and poor? 
Or Crime, perchance you'll say, 

Some vicious evil-doer ? 

Ah, faith, I do not know; 

And if you curious be, 

Go there yourself and see, 
There still is time to go . . . 

The last line, of course, contains a reference to the 
demolitions then in progress throughout the old quar- 
ters of Paris. Among the many monuments doomed 
to disappear was the old Pompe Notre-Dame on 
which Meryon composed the following verse, entitled 
La Petite Pompe. Set in a very clever and amusingly 
Bacchic border which seems to exude drunkenness in 
every line, this little conceit has been well characterized 
by one writer as an "elegant and witty fantasy": — ■ 

You've served your day, 

Lackaday! 

Poor old pump, 

Shorn of your pomp, 

You now must die! 

But to mollify 

This iniquitous decree, 

By a Bacchic pleasantry, 

Why, pump, do not you, 

Quite impromptu, 

Instead of water pure, 

No folks can endure, 

Pump wine, 

Very fine? 

23 



Not the destruction, but the restoration, of the 
Pont-Neuf produced the following two stanzas, the 
second with its whimsical, yet wistful, reference, per- 
haps to his own infirmities : — 

Of old Pont-Neuf the view 
Exactly shown you see, 
All furbished up anew 
By recent town decree. 

Doctors, who know each ill, 
And surgeons full of skill, 
Why not with flesh and bone, 
Deal as with bridge of stone? 

According to Delteil, these verses occur only in the 
sixth state of Le Pont-Neuf; but the text, as he gives 
it, does not coincide in the last two lines with that of 
a proof in the New York Public Library from which 
I have made the above translation, nor does it make 
good sense. 

Of all Meryon's important plates, the one which he 
worked over and altered most in successive states — 
these number eleven — is Le Pont-au-Change. In the 
second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, there appears 
in the upper left-hand corner a balloon on which is 
inscribed the word "Speranza." This balloon gives 
way in the seventh to a flock of birds which, in turn, 
disappear in the tenth in favor of a flight of small 
balloons; while in the eleventh and last still other bal- 
loons are added, including a larger one which bears, 
this time, the name of " (Vas)co da Gama." It is not 
difficult to see how, to his imaginative mind with its 
mystical turn for symbols and correspondences, man's 
soaring invention could become identified with his in- 
domitable readiness to rise, even from the depths of 

24 




Meryon. La Rue des Mauvais Gar<;ons 
Size of the original etching, 4% X 3% inches 




Meryon. La Petite Pompe 
Size of the original etching, 4*4 X 3Vh inches 




2L 

Meryon. Le Pont-Neuf 
ize of the original etching, 7% inches square 



despair. To develop the spiritual significance of this 
analogy, and to explain the inscription of the word 
"Speranza" on his first balloon, he wrote the follow- 
ing poem which enables us to penetrate the very mood 
of the brain-sick: — 

O power of Hope divine, Balloon, with upward urge, 

Like the pale skiff that rocks upon the swelling surge, 

Stirred by the careless breath of Autumns full of peace, 

You float, and in the mists, set swirling by the breeze, 

Reveal yourself sometimes unto our eager eyes, 

In the calm tracts of space, on the blue ground of the skies, 

Where the life-giving rays of a bright sun that gleams, 

A line of gold do trace below the brilliant dreams 

Of doubtful days to come ; descend and build anew 

The courage, sorely tried, of the rude and storm-tossed crew; 

Of warriors stern and bold, who for a better fate, 

Before the press of foes, still bear themselves elate, 

Of wounded, broken hearts, who seek o'er earth in vain 

The unknown joy they scent, and hunger to attain! 

But, moody dreamer, why, when pictures are thy trade, 

Wilt thou among the clouds forever promenade? 

Descend, descend to earth, and do no longer try 

To climb the paths too steep, that lead up through the sky. 

Fear thou of Fate to tempt the wayward fantasy, 

For never unto men is she with favors free. 

And since you hold the point, through fortune's latest freak, 

That makes a needy etcher of the sailor far too weak, 

So work that on the copper, black-glazed, that you must hollow, 

Your hand will leave behind the ripple that should follow 

Each feeble skiff that passes upon the stormy sea 

That men call life, whose waters both harsh and bitter be, 

Where oft, too oft, alas, the lying hope that bore 

Us on with siren lure deserts us at the shore! 

If the foregoing, with its note of pensive self-con- 
munion, is the most personal and poignant of all 
the poems, UHotellerie de la Mort is the most pow- 
erful and passionate. Written to accompany La 
Morgue, it completes the purpose of that etching by 
carrying the eye beyond the grim walls of the "inn of 

25 



death" to the soul of the sinister tragedy within. In 
it a sense of profoundest pity struggles with the never- 
failing ironic perception of the artist, in a strange 
atmosphere of imaginative fantasy, to produce an 
agonized and heart-rending cry of revolt against the 
mysterious principle of suffering that pervades the 
universe. Peace and a promise of felicity are found 
at last in an influx of that peculiar mystical sentiment 
and insight which would seem to have its source in 
German romanticism : — 

Come, view, ye passersby, 
Where her poor children lie; 
A mother charitable, 
This Paris that you see. 
To them, at all times free, 
Gives both a bed and table. . . . 

See, without turning pale, 
These faces that show naught, 
Some smiling, some distraught, 
The future's mystic tale. . . . 

Here Death herds all the drove 
Of those whom Fate waylays 
Upon the stony ways, 
Through Envy, Want, and Love. . 

When upon Paris breaks 
The pitiless hue and cry, 
Satan himself then quakes, 
So full the tables lie. . . . 

Ah, may thou ne'er be shown 
On this black bier of stone, 
Of some one dear to thee, 
The awful effigy! . . . 

Oh, passers, passers, pray 
For all who pass this way, 
26 



' 




Meryon. La Morgue 
Size of the original etching, 9y 8 X 8% inches 



And down to death are hurled 
Forever, without measure, 
By this great haunt of pleasure, 
Here in this famous world! 

And yet, Death, may it not, 
'Neath the stern mask we see, 
Hide, of man's final lot, 
Some smiling mystery? 

Who knows if, Grief and Pain 

Drawing aside their screen, 

At the end of toil and strain, 

The star may not be seen? 

Then on, poor human bands, 

Dig and delve in the earth, 

With your feet and with your hands. 

For there is due to dearth 

Some black bread every day! 

If under famine's flail, 

With night still on the way, 

Your forces growing frail, 

And stricken with dismay, 

Upon the road are spent; 

If you envisage Death, 

Whom God perchance doth send, 

Then, with your latest breath, 

Wiping away your tears, 

Glance at the vaulted skies, 

Where cease for aye men's fears. 

Lift up again your eyes! 

There you perchance will read 

That for you now draws nigh 

The sweet days of no need. 

When, never more to die, 

The flower shall unfold, 

The flower with fresh corol, 

With the holy aureole, 

Of blessings manifold, 

Whose germ all hearts do hold! 

Equally characteristic, in a certain note of sardonic 
humor, is the little piece of six lines which Meryon 
affixed to VAbside de Notre-Dame: — 

27 



O you who subtly relish each bit of Gothic style, 

Then view you here, of Paris, the noble churchly pile : 

High they have wished to build it, our great and saintly kings, 

To give, unto their master, their deep repentance wings. 

Although it is so large, alas, they call it now too small, 

Of those who fashionably sin, for it to hold them all! 

This completes the first Paris series on the literary- 
side, nor are there any poems for the later Paris pic- 
tures, except one of little interest for Le Bain-Froid 
Chevrier, which appears in the proofs with letters. 
Unlike the others, this is engraved on the plate in Ro- 
man characters instead of being etched in the artist's 
own handwriting, which is, perhaps, one reason why 
it seems less personal and more perfunctory. Worthier 
of translation is the little set of verses which Meryon 
inscribed in a portfolio of the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris 
sent, in 1854, to his friend, Eugene Blery, who taught 
him how to etch : — 

Blery, to you, my guide, 
Who first for me untied 
Of art, your secret way; 
Who did, without delay, 
Of your high-burning soul, 
The mirror bright unveil; 
My Muse, fresh for the goal, 
Of what it hath, though frail, 
Would make an offering, 
In graving here your name 
Within the frontis frame 
Of this small gift of hers — 
Though what stirs in her heart 
But feebly it avers — 
The first fruits of her art. 

Had Meryon ever carried out his scheme for a port- 
folio of prints illustrative of his travels in the South 
Seas, he might have written a number of poems to ac- 

28 




Meryon. Le Pilote de Tonga (1861) 

This song, composed in prose, after the manner of the inhabitants of New 
Zealand, was intended as a preface to a series of souvenirs of the voyage of 
the corvet Rhin, which Meryon intended to illustrate. 

Size of the original etching, 8 X 5% inches 



company them. As it is, we have only one inspired by 
this subject and by this episode in his life. It is un- 
rhymed and is, in fact, a sort of prose poem. "I did 
not make this little piece as a song," wrote Meryon 
in Mes Observations, "though it doubtless contains 
the material for one, according to the custom of the 
Islanders." It reminds one of similar little pictures, 
simple and rhythmic in line and glowing with light 
and color, presented by that other great artist who 
visited the South Seas and who has left a literary as 
well as an artistic record of his impressions — the late 
John La Farge. The text of Meryon' s graceful and 
spirited composition is printed in red, and is sur- 
rounded with a frame of Polynesian ornament. It is 
entitled 

LE PILOTE DE TONGA 

We sailed from Tonga on a ship of war; 
now comes the Pilot in his frail pirogue. 

He is nearly nude. Agile and strong, with 
one leap he is on board; he goes straight to 
the commander and greets him with a cour- 
teous salute. 

The ship spreads her sails to the winds; 
swiftly sped by the breeze that swells them, 
she enters 

the narrow and dangerous strait. 

Standing on the quarter-deck, his head held 
high and his eye alert, the skilful pilot shows 
with a gesture the course of the ship which 
runs gaily among the reefs! His is the noble 
attitude of the Sylvan. Everything about him 
denotes assurance. His broad bosom, of tawny 
hue, gleams in the sunlight like a bronze 
buckler. His long locks float in the wind. 

29 



On board all is still. Officers and sailors 
admire him in silence, 

And the ship sails on, and on, and on. 

But the channel broadens. At length the 
surge of the open sea sounds beneath the 
prow. 

Hurrah! valiant pilot! hurrah! 

The strait is passed! 

Pursue thy course, O noble ship; before us opens now 

The Ocean! 

And to thee, Pilot of Tonga, thanks! 

Very different from this purely descriptive and 
decorative composition is the last of Meryon's met- 
rical compositions, UAttelage, with its dramatic 
form and its profound sense of the misery of life for 
the humble. Like the other poems, it is in his own 
handwriting, and it has a decorative initial in the 
shape of a summary but suggestive sketch of a bit of 
dreary landscape that accentuates the moral atmos- 
phere of the poem itself : — 

A horse crawled on his way, sad, and with hanging head, 

For he was old and thin, and powdered o'er with dust. 

Behind him, as he went, a pensive yokel led 

An ancient plow that creaked, unoiled, and worn with rust. 

The man was spare and bent, by age, so it did seem, 

And I felt deepest pity for this unhappy team. 

And that I might console them, when as I came in reach, 

'O weary slaves,' to both I thus began my speech, 

'You will have rest at evening, when you are growing old.' . . . 

— I had not finished speaking, when both at once, decisive: 

'We hope for nothing ever: for us, no mirth will hold 

'The future years derisive. 

'For we are of the race foredoomed from birth to toil. 

'Poor man, poor animal, 

' Both with our burdens shall 

'Go turning up the soil, 

30 



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Merton. L'Attelage 
Size of the original etching, 5%X 3% inches 



'With sweat, in summer's heat. 

' For what our lord inherits, 't is ours to cause to swell 

'And make the oats grow well 

'That other mouths shall eat.' 

— 'T is true, I mused, for them their weariness is vain; 

Their labor and their sweat, their long hours and their pain, 

Do bring them no return; ah! it is truly taught, 

That certain men, too many, more than in justice ought, 

In this life suffer all, and what the generous fee 

For all their thankless toil? — Death — so it seems to me . . . 

Other pieces written by Meryon, and either etched 
or engraved on copper, have a curious rather than a 
literary interest. Thus Petit Prince Ditto is a polit- 
ical pasquinade on the Prince Imperial and con- 
tains a scurrilous reference to his reputed origin. The 
two plates entitled respectively La Loi Lunaire and La 
Loi Solaire are, as Burty calls them, philosophical 
fantasies based upon a system of absolute morality. 
The first, in particular, both in the order of its ideas 
and in the symbolic style of its decoration, reminds 
one somewhat of Blake, between whom and Meryon 
there are certain points of resemblance both in tem- 
perament and in intellectual organization. Through 
the latter, with his powerful objective vision, there runs 
a vein of unmistakable mystic sentiment and percep- 
tion. True mystics have always been thus endowed, 
and it may even be said that the primary basis of 
mysticism is a firm grasp upon the ordinary realities 
of life. It is from this ground, and not from any vague 
indistinctness, or any absolute denial of the senses, 
that the mystic worthy of the name soars to his trans- 
cendent interpretation of life as a whole. 

Seen aright, each of Meryon's plates is such an 
interpretation, and his poems aid us to understand 

31 



them in such a sense. But their function is not merely 
interpretative. They have, in addition, an intrinsic 
literary value of their own. They possess sincerity 
and depth of feeling, and, in the matter of expression, 
a certain blunt and homely directness that I have en- 
deavored to preserve in my renderings, even at the 
expense of smoothness. They are, moreover, entirely 
original, — so much so, indeed, that Meryon has all 
the air of having actually invented poetry for his own 
peculiar purposes, as he invented his simple yet strik- 
ingly decorative way of presenting it. 

And yet these original and naive verses, so evi- 
dently the work of a hand quite unpracticed in the 
art of poetry, of a mind of no particular literary cul- 
ture — of a medieval ballad-mind, if I may be allowed 
the expression — have their affinities with other poetry. 
As I have faithfully turned his French alexandrines 
into their precise equivalent, his quaint homeliness re- 
minds me of more than one elder English poet — Sir 
Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, Michael Drayton — 
who tried to give Renaissance form to this, our tradi- 
tional ballad measure. But in mood and intellectual 
content, it is to the great poets of the nineteenth cen- 
tury that he is most akin. Thus, in the pensive pes- 
simism of the wistful searcher of the skies, we seem 
to listen to a less convinced and more mystical Leo- 
pardi; in L'Hotellerie de la Mort there is a hint of 
Hood's humanitarian sentiment and social invective; 
in UAttelage sounds the same outraged sense of the 
dignity of human labor, and even of the moral claims 
of animal life, that penetrates modern poetical expres- 
sion from Burns to Baudelaire; 1 while, in Meryon's 

1 This poem, however, presents an even more remarkable parallel 
32 



frequent bizarrerie of diction, his imaginative fantasy, 
and his fondness for the occult and the abstract — 
his metaphysical note, in short — we recognize that 
he is brother to Poe and a forerunner of the Symbolistes. 
Thus, also, they have their value as a gloss on the 
moral and spiritual evolution of the age, these little 
poems which, finally, thrill us as the product of the 
same mind which imagined the austere, grandiose, and 
mystical visions of the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, and of 
the hand which graved these on the copper with such 
restrained ardor of execution. 

with that famous production of fourteenth-century, or Middle- 
English, literature, " The Vision of Piers the Ploughman." Not only 
the spirit, but the very language, of Meryon's piece is found in such a 
passage as the following from Miss Jessie L. Weston's admirable ren- 
dering into modern English in "Romance, Vision, and Satire": — 

" Some set them to the plough-share, and seldom thought of play. 
In harrowing and sowing they gain, laboriously, 
What many of their masters destroy in gluttony. 




Ill 

MAXIME LALANKE 

NTRODUCED into France by the "Men of 
1830" as a phase of the revival of land- 
scape art and as an intimate instrument of 
self-expression, modern painter-etching 
dates its decline in that country from about 1860, 
when it began to become popular. It is not without 
significance that Lalanne's first plate, the Rue des 
Marmousets, should have been published the same year 
—1862— as a little article with the suggestive title, 
"L'Eau-forte est a la mode," which Baudelaire con- 
tributed anonymously to the Revue anecdotique. For, 
if Jacque was, as he is commonly regarded, the pioneer 
of the movement, the distinguished Bordelais, who was 
decorated for his work by the King of Portugal— 
critics and biographers have seemed to attach an ironic 
importance to this unique recognition — may be said 
to have brought it to a close. Bracquemond and 
Jacque continued productive long after 1860, but La- 
lanne was the last considerable new talent to appear. 
After him comes Buhot. This clever artist, however, 
stands alone, remote from any tradition, and his dis- 
dain for all restraints arising from the nature of his 
medium, marks in him the decadence of etching as a 
distinct style. 

34 




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This is by no means the case with Lalanne. Pos- 
sessed of scarcely less skill than Buhot, he canalized his 
cleverness, and confined his virtuosity to overcoming 
the difficulties involved in a strict adherence to certain 
fixed rules of procedure. That his work gained by 
this rigid discipline of taste is unquestionable. To it 
must be attributed the combined strength and delicacy 
of a style which, more than that of any other French 
etcher, keeps the freedom, vigor, and directness of the 
Dutch masters, and unites with these qualities the 
elegance and lucidity of the Gallic temperament. Al- 
though trained in the use of the fusain, Lalanne never 
was seduced by love of depth and richness of tone into 
abandoning, or even modifying, the pure linear tech- 
nique which is the basic principle of the art of the 
needle. In this he may be contrasted with another 
advocate of pure line— Haden— who, however, in his 
frequent use of dry-point, not less than in his experi- 
ments late in life with mezzotint, betrays a distinctly 
national bias toward what is, perhaps, the most char- 
acteristic mode of English black-and-white art. In 
two plates, Lcs Bords de la Tamise and Richmond, 
which, perversely enough, although by no means in his 
most interesting manner, are given by many critics 
almost the highest rank among his works, Lalanne 
emulated Haden in a certain tenderness of sentimen- 
tal and atmospheric suggestion. But he never sought 
to secure his rich effects of light and shade, or his bril- 
liant tonal contrasts. 

There was nothing sensuous in the temperament of 
Lalanne, which may rather be described as spirituel. 
"Amusant et piquant," is the way Beraldi describes 
his method, and these two words accurately indicate 

35 



a mental attitude on the part of the artist toward his 
material. At the root of his inspiration lay a habit of 
analysis which made him see line where another would 
see mass, and seek to reduce expression to the simplest 
and most logical terms in that medium. Even his sen- 
timent partakes of this abstract intellectual character, 
and is stirred in him by the grace of a curve, the caress 
of a contour, rather than by any deeper appeal to the 
emotions. Sensibility of this sort occasionally weakens 
his work, as in the two popular plates, Aux Environs 
de Paris and Le Canal a Pont-Sainte-Maxence, through 
the excessive attenuation of natural forms to which it 
leads. But it never produces vagueness or obscurity. 
On the contrary, clarity is a distinguishing trait of 
Lalanne's style. No one has ever been able to express 
himself more clearly, fluently, or concisely in the 
medium of etching. He apparently never experienced 
the slightest difficulty in saying precisely what he 
wished and in selecting the precise way in which to 
say it. Seldom, in his best plates, is there a stroke that 
is not essential ; and in many of his sketches, where he 
employs a free line remarkable alike for the brevity 
of its indications, the clearness of its evocative power, 
and the negligent nonchaloir of its flowing loops and 
lacets, he reveals a faculty for generalization that is 
amazing. 

There is no better example of this witty laconism of 
style than the Rue des Marmousets. Although it is his 
first plate, it exhibits a maturity of method that would 
never lead one to suspect that it was the work of a be- 
ginner. There is original creative power in the simple 
solidity of his architectural constructions, in the effec- 
tive distribution and biting of his relatively few lines, 

36 




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Lalanne. Rxje des Marmousets 

"C'est de tems immemorial, que le bruit a couru qu'il y avoit en la Cite de 
Paris, rue des Marmousets, un patissier meurtrier, lequel ayant occis en sa 
maison un homme, ayde a ce par un sien voisin barbier, faignant raser la 
barbe: de la chair d'ieelui faisit des pastez qui se trouvoient meilleurs que les 
aultres, d'autant que la chair de l'homme est plus delicate, a cause de la 
nourriture, que celle des aultres animaux." 

P. Jacques du Breul, Le Theatre des Antiquites de Paris (1612). 

Size of the original etching, 9i/ 2 X 6% inches 



and in his ability to evoke the genius loci of the grisly 
pastrycook's sinister shop. Meryon may have sug- 
gested the subject, but his influence did not extend to 
the style of treatment. The technique is Lalanne's 
own. It is more modern than Meryon 's, and it is 
akin to Whistler's, rather than to that of the classic 
school whence Meryon derived his initial inspiration. 
The latter, though romantic in spirit, was classic in 
form. Lalanne, on the contrary, was a true impres- 
sionist ; and as etching is essentially an impressionistic 
art, Lalanne may even be said, in this sense, to be the 
superior of Meryon, whose art tended to merge in that 
of line-engraving. 

The differences between the two men are well exem- 
plified in their ways of working. Meryon made tiny 
pencil sketches of the parts of his composition which 
he afterward assembled on the plate. Lalanne, 
sketching for the most part directly on the copper, 
made each successive plate a leaf in a vast note-book. 
"What he thus lost through the absence of reflection and 
deliberate design, he gained in spontaneity and in live- 
liness of execution. Still, charming as it is, much of 
his work seems somehow trivial and deficient. One 
cannot look through the eight fat portfolios that con- 
tain the complete collection of it in the New York 
Public Library, without receiving an impression of 
monotony, and even, it must be said, mediocrity. La- 
lanne traveled much, and thus shows no lack of va- 
riety in his subject-matter; but his motives are few, 
casual, and constantly repeated. Nor does this repeti- 
tion lead in the end to any greater depth of penetra- 
tion—to the consecutive "conquest" of nature. His 
prolific output is not due to any deep passion, as in the 

37 



case of Claude Lorrain, to wrest from Nature her in- 
most secrets, but rather, one feels, to a simple taste for 
the picturesque, and also to a love of etching for its 
own sake — a sheer physical delight in the manipula- 
tion of the needle. 

Lalanne was neither a thinker nor a poet, he had 
neither deep personal emotion, exalted imaginative 
vision, nor consuming scientific curiosity. His voca- 
tion as an artist was a vocation of hand and eye rather 
than of heart and brain. ' ' Hugo, if you do not see his 
rock of Guernsey, loses something of his elevation," 
writes Maurice Barres in an attempt to prove that the 
personality of the lyric poet is the necessary comple- 
ment of his expression. Yet it is possible to view the 
pedestal, and even then to miss the greatness of the 
statue. This is undeniably the case with Lalanne, who 
visited Hugo in his exile, and made a series of fifteen 
plates portraying the poet and his domain. The 
Hugo of these pictures scarcely forecasts in prestige 
and grandeur the old man, the first sight of whom, 
talking with Leconte de Lisle in the library of the 
Senate, so filled the young Barres with emotion. He 
is merely a middle-aged Frenchman of some political 
importance, en villegiature, where he has been visited 
by an inquisitive artist of the Paris press. 

Instances could be multiplied indefinitely to illus- 
trate this moral and imaginative deficiency in La- 
lanne, which has been by no means overlooked by 
critics. And yet, in spite of it, Lalanne holds a dis- 
tinct place of his own among French painter-etchers 
of the nineteenth century. Others employed the point 
more penetratingly in their search for the truth of 
nature and of their own souls. Still others reared 

38 










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03 O 



with it edifices more massive and moods more imagina- 
tive, but no one else has used it so cursively, with such 
literary grace and facility, or developed a style so 
accomplished and idiomatic. Nor is this all. If Me- 
ryon had more of the classic severity of form, Lalanne 
had more of the classic serenity of spirit. In many 
of his landscapes there is a tranquil charm, a gentle 
pensiveness of mood, which humanizes, as it were, the 
aspects of nature. Perhaps the finest, because most 
deeply felt, of the pure landscapes is the plate entitled 
Bordeaux, Vue de Cenon, which has a note of nobility 
in its composition and in its wide sweep of sky and 
steepled plain. More intimate and familiar, with a 
touch of rustic grace and idyllic freshness, are the 
views in the neighborhood of Nogent— the home of 
Flaubert's Frederic Moreau. Doubtless it was as La- 
lanne pictured them, that Barres felt his desire drawn 
by the canals and meadows of this Seine country on 
his "Voyage de Sparte"; and these little etchings, so 
filled with a sense of tender playfulness in their exe- 
cution, may well help us to understand something of 
the Frenchman's nostalgia for his native soil. 

Even more than to nature, Lalanne was attracted to 
cities, and in his views of Paris and Bordeaux there is 
a simple, intuitive apprehension of the scene as a 
whole— the way a child sees things— which lifts 
familiar sights, and constructions of brick and stone, 
as completely out of the commonplace of every-day, as 
does Meryon's somber vision. Thus, in his temper no 
less than in certain incompletely realized pictorial 
intentions, and in that preference for humanized 
aspects of landscape which sets him apart from the 
Barbizon artists, he has affinities with the school of 

39 



Claude, to whom his friends rather indiscreetly com- 
pared him in his lifetime. "I shall not speak of you 
. . . nor of your etchings, in which the style of 
Claude is so well united to the grace of Karel Du jar- 
din," wrote Charles Blanc in a letter to Lalanne 
which is printed in the English translation of the lat- 
ter 's treatise on etching, the standard text-book on this 
subject. He lacks the sustained seriousness and ele- 
vation of the master, but he has something of the 
charm of the disciple. He has also certain definite 
artistic achievements to his credit. "Who, for ex- 
ample, has ever condensed a greater sense of space 
into small compass, or introduced such multiplic- 
ity of detail without confusion or dispersal of in- 
terest, as Lalanne, in his Quai des Chartrons a Bor- 
deaux? Who has rendered the long, dazzling reaches 
of seashore with so few lines, and with so much magic 
of atmosphere and perspective, as Lalanne in his etch- 
ings of the Norman coast — Villers, Dives, Beuzeval, 
Calvados? His masterpieces are not many, but few 
etchers have produced so many plates on a sustained 
level of excellence; and if from these there could be 
eliminated the inferior work which for one reason or 
another he also produced, the etchings which remain 
would surprise more than one critic and collector who 
now is disposed to dismiss Lalanne as a facile manu- 
facturer of pretty plates "easily comprehended of 
the people." 



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IV 

SOME FRENCH ETCHERS AND 
SONNETEERS 

RITING in 1862 of that revival of etching 
which his own appreciation of Meryon and 
other contemporary etchers did so much to 
promote, Charles Baudelaire expressed his 
belief that this art would never become really popular, 
although he admitted that he might be a bad prophet 
and hoped that he would prove so. Time, however, has 
fully justified his vaticination, and to-day it is more 
clearly understood than ever before, that the personal, 
and therefore aristocratic, element, which the French 
poet and connoisseur correctly felt to be of the very 
essence of etching, must of necessity limit its appeal 
and forever keep it the favored medium of the few 
rather than of the many. Yet, at the precise moment, 
any one less perspicacious than he might well have been 
pardoned for a far more optimistic outlook. Never, in all 
its history had etching appeared more likely to achieve 
popularity than when Baudelaire was writing his little 
articles, Peintres et Aqua-f artistes, and L'Eau-forte est a 
la mode. As the latter title indicates, the art of the 
needle had already become the vogue among the more 
cultured classes of Parisian society, and this tended to 

41 



increase rather than to diminish during the remaining 
years of the decade. The ranks of the etchers were 
rapidly swelled with new recruits as eminent painters 
and humble illustrators alike experimented with the 
needle, while teachers like Lalanne and Gaucherel 
turned out clever students from their well-attended 
classes. 

But the public demand for prints kept pace with the 
supply, and in order to meet it more directly, Cadart, 
who had founded the French Etching Club on the model 
of the Society of English Etchers, started a periodical of 
his own, to which the majority of the leading etchers 
of the time contributed. Even his catalogues were care- 
fully arranged little works of art, embellished with 
miniature masterpieces by Veyrassat and other popular 
favorites. Nor was this all. Etching very largely took 
the place of lithography for the production of views of 
contemporary historical events. So that, just as Raffet 
drew upon the stone the incidents of his martial epic, 
of which the glory of the French arms was the theme, 
Lalanne bit upon the copperplate scenes connected with 
their tragic humiliation and defeat in the Siege of Paris. 
It even competed with wood-engraving as an illustra- 
tive medium for books and magazines; and for many 
years — or until the photogravure process came to take 
its place for intaglio impressions — no pretentious de 
luxe volume was complete without a series of eaux- 
fortes by some eminent etcher or group of etchers. 

Of such works the most interesting to students of the 
modern revival of etching, especially if they are also 
somewhat familiar with the literary history of the period 
in France, is perhaps Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. 1 Baudelaire 

1 Sonnets et Eaux-fortes, mdccclxix. Alphonse Lemerre, Editeur. 

42 



had already pointed out the special appeal of the 
medium to the man of letters; and doubtless this sump- 
tuous volume, which was published in Paris in 1869, 
and which aimed to bring together as author and illus- 
trator all the principal poets and etchers of the period 
— including a few foreign artists of distinction — was 
more or less directly inspired by his dictum. Forty- 
two poets and etchers cooperated in this joint enterprise 
which, it is significant to note, was engineered, not by 
Cadart or any other publisher identified with the his- 
tory of etching under the Second Empire, but with one 
who hitherto had limited himself exclusively to literary 
enterprises, and was intimately associated with the rise 
of the " Parnassian" school of French poetry. The 
house of Lemerre is to-day one of the most important in 
Paris. But its beginnings, which reach back only four or 
five years before the publication of Sonnets et Eaux-fortes, 
were modest — even humble — enough. M. Edmond 
Lepelletier has given an interesting account of these in 
his Paul Verlaine, Sa Vie, Son CEuvre, 1 as well as of the 
group of poets of whom, as M. Remy de Gourmont 
points out in a recent appreciation of their belated 
survivor, Leon Dierx, it is difficult to say whether they 
most owe their success to Lemerre, or he owes his to 
them. 

The leaders of the Parnassian movement had at first 
assumed the style of Les Impassibles; and, as this name 
indicates, they cultivated an attitude of stoic self- 
restraint with which was blended an element of dandyism 

Paris. 350 copies, and plates destroyed. Dedicated " Aux poetes et aux 
artistes qui ont collabores a cette ceuvre, a M. Philippe Burty qui en 
a dirige l'illustration, l'editeur reconnaissant, A. Lemerre." 

1 Paul Verlaine, His Life — His Work. Translated into English by 
E. M. Lang. New York: Duffield & Co. 

43 



and of disdainful indifference towards the common con- 
cerns of mankind. They repudiated the lachrymose sen- 
timentality of Lamartine, the "unlyrical brilliance" of 
Alfred de Musset, and — although they continued to 
admire the poet himself — the political preoccupations 
and humanitarian enthusiasms of Victor Hugo. Their 
new note which, in brief, represented simply a reaction 
against the excesses of romanticism, was — in theory, 
at least — compounded of a frigid impersonality, an 
ideal adoration of beauty as it appealed primarily to the 
painter and to the sculptor, and an entire devotion to 
the practice of an impeccable, painstaking, and rather 
inhuman, art. Thus they found their naturally ap- 
pointed masters in Theophile Gautier, with his doctrine 
of "Tart pour Vart" Alfred de Vigny, with the lordly 
isolation of his " ivory tower"; Theodore de Banville, 
with his virtuosity and scrupulous exactitude in the 
use of the metrical instrument he did so much to develop 
and refine; and Charles Baudelaire, with his strange 
intensity, and yet almost reticent sobriety and restraint 
of expression, making him one of the most enigmatic of 
poets and artists. Closest to them all, however, on the 
personal, as on the artistic, side — their real elder 
brother in the spirit — stood the Creole poet, Leconte 
de Lisle, who seemed to soar above the world on the 
wings of the eagle which he himself has described, and 
to embrace the entire vision of earth and sky in his epic 
gaze. 

Like all Parisian movements, this one was organized 
in a cafe, but it soon found a salon in the home of one of 
its leaders, Louis-Xavier Ricard, at No. 10, Boulevard 
des Batignolles, where Madame Ricard, mother of the 
poet and journalist, entertained her son's associates, 

44 



and let them talk as long and as loudly as they 
liked. 

"This improvised salon," writes M. Lepelletier, "was 
a simple and suburban affair/' but "it exercised a deci- 
sive influence upon the movement of ideas, and more 
especially upon the formation of a new school of poetry 
among the literary youth of 1866-70. It was here that 
Parnassianism had its cradle," and it was here that 
many poets, destined to become famous, made their 
debut. For example, it "witnessed the first introduction 
of a rough-headed poet, whose appearance had the effect 
of a dawn, viz., the brilliant and sparkling Catulle 
Mendes: refinement in ringlets. He was credited in 
those days with the vices of which he was probably 
ignorant, and the talent of which he already showed 
signs was not properly appreciated. Mendes, in his 
turn, introduced a young man, pale and thin, with 
brilliant, deep-set eyes, and inscrutable expression, 
whom he presented to us as a clerk in the War Office, 
desirous of reciting some verses . . . His name was 
Francois Coppee." 

"At his side might be seen a youth of serene aspect 
and tranquil mien, with a small nose, somewhat senten- 
tious speech, of circumspect regard, and prudent hand- 
shake, who delivered himself of a sonnet, which had 
something to do with a turbot, placed by a decree of the 
senate before Csesar with sauce piquante" This was 
Anatole France, whose mind seems to have been 
obsessed by the thought of Caesar at this time, since, 
as we shall see, the sonnet which he contributed to 
Sonnets et Eaux-fortes dealt with another phase of the 
same subject. " Sully-Prudhomme, the oldest of us all, 
graceful and gentle, . . . also recited, in a slow, monoto- 

45 



nous sing-song, the admirable philosophical sonnets 
which later on were collected and published under the 
title, Les Epreuves. One by one they leant against the 
mantelpiece to enunciate their verses, retiring after- 
wards to a corner in silence." 

There were others as well, among them the mad 
genius, Auguste Villiers de ITsle-Adam, and the West 
Indian, Jose-Maria de Heredia, " sonorous, exuberant, 
amiable, well-dressed, displaying a gold chain on his 
evening waistcoat, with his handsome brown beard," — 
in short, a typical creole gentleman of the planter class 
— who " would declaim sounding verses and reproduce 
the cries with which Artemis filled Ortygia as she chased 
the wild leopards. Les Trophees, with its note of triumph, 
published twenty-five years later, dates from this 
period." 

But although these young poets enjoyed their private 
recitals before a sympathetic audience, they were ambi- 
tious to reach a larger public, and what they wanted 
more than anything else was, accordingly, a publisher. 

"Our comrade, Ernest Boutier (a violinist), knew a 
bookseller in the Passage Choiseul, whose customers 
mostly purchased books of prayer and first communion, 
which he displayed at No. 45, the corner shop, where the 
Passage opened out into the Place Ventadour, in which 
the Italian theatre then stood. This bookseller was 
young, intelligent, enterprising, ambitious, and dreamed 
of something better than being the mere successor of a 
certain Percepied. He therefore lent an ear to the ten- 
tative suggestions of Ernest Boutier, backed up by 
Verlaine, Ricard, and myself; and finally consented to 
publish certain volumes of poetry, which it was under- 
stood were to be printed at the expense of the authors, 

46 



and to act as agent for a literary journal we were con- 
templating." 

The first volume issued was del, Rue, et Foyer, by 
Ricard, and this was followed by two volumes, he 
Reliquaire and Poemes Saturniens by Francois Coppee 
and Paul Verlaine respectively— "a triple commence- 
ment, and also the first essay of the excellent Alphonse 
Lemerre, who was before long to conquer fame and for- 
tune by publishing poetry, an undertaking at all times 
hazardous, and in those days regarded as absolutely 
mad." 

Then in the same year was launched the now cele- 
brated collection of contemporary verse, Parnasse 
Conte?nporain — so called at the suggestion of a scholar 
who was engaged in editing Ronsard and the other 
poets of La Pleiade for Lemerre — which gave its name 
to an entire period of French poetry. Edited by Ricard, 
it appeared monthly in parts of sixteen pages each, from 
March 3 to July 14, 1866. The first part contained 
poems by Gautier, Banville, and Heredia. The second 
was entirely devoted to Leconte de Lisle. The third 
brought together Louis Menard, Francois Coppee, and 
Auguste Vacquerie. Part V presented some new Fleurs 
du Mai by Baudelaire, and so on through a long list 
which includes Leon Dierx, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul 
Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, and others too numerous 
to mention. 

Poets old and young, and of all shades of poetic tem- 
perament, were assembled in this eclectic publication 
which attracted such general attention that, three years 
later, Lemerre, who by that time had achieved important 
success, issued a second series with the editorial assist- 
ance of Leconte de Lisle. "Some of the poets who, for 

47 



various reasons, and notably Sainte-Beuve and Auguste 
Barbier . . . were not included among the authors in 
the first volume, were invited to take part in the sec- 
ond," and the gates of Parnassus swung wide to include 
a host of newcomers. 

This second volume appeared in 1869, and the same 
year Lemerre issued Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. It might 
well have been entitled Parnasse Contemporain Illustre; 
for nearly all the poets represented in it had already 
appeared in one or the other, or both, of the preceding 
volumes, and it was no less representative of the new 
movement. The Parnassian poets, having proclaimed 
an impersonal and objective attitude, and adopted a 
descriptive method based mainly on visual impressions, 
recognized a special affinity between their art and that 
of design. What, therefore, could be more appropriate 
and suggestive from an aesthetic standpoint, than an ac- 
tive alliance between the two, in which each should sup- 
plement the other, the sharpness of the etched line deep- 
ening the impressions of form and color conveyed more 
faintly by the words, and these, in turn, amplifying the 
ideas and sentiments that the artists were able to indi- 
cate only indirectly and symbolically in the pictures? 
We have already mentioned Baudelaire's approxima- 
tion of etching to the art of literary expression. There 
was also another way in which his influence was felt. 
A collector himself, this friend of Meryon set the fashion 
for the man of letters to be an amateur des estampes, and 
the patron of etchers, and there was more than one 
example of friendly relations between the practitioners 
in the two arts, as in the case of Bracquemond and 
the Goncourts. Several poets had even experimented 
with the needle themselves. Chief among these was 

48 



irfffljOjiffrjri 




Daubigny. Le Verger 
Size of the original etching, 7% X 4% inches 



Victor Hugo, who had been instructed by Maxime La- 
lanne on the island of Guernsey; while, among the 
minor poets, Claudius Popelin was both a painter and 
an etcher, as well as a designer in enamel. 

Popelin enjoys the unique distinction of appearing in 
his dual capacity in Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. It is, how- 
ever, a distinction to which he is scarcely entitled by 
any skill on his part. A competent, but not in any 
way remarkable, poet, he shows himself a very feeble 
draughtsman in the inferior figure study for Heredia's 
fine sonnet, Les Conquerants, while he, in turn, is illus- 
trated, in his Dernier Amour de Charlemagne, with equal 
mediocrity, by an obscure painter and etcher named 
Ehrmann. Victor Hugo, on the other hand, appears 
only as an artist. He had previously pleaded an arrange- 
ment with his publisher as an excuse for not contribut- 
ing to either of the volumes of the Parnasse, and no 
doubt the same plea explains his non-appearance here 
as a poet. But no such obstacle existed to his sending in 
a dessin for the sonnet, U Eclair, of his young friend and 
admirer, Paul Meurice, who later became his literary 
executor, and it must unquestionably have flattered the 
colossal vanity of the poet to be thus publicly accorded 
a place among the recognized masters of designing. 
The plate which bears his name, however, was etched, 
not by Hugo himself, but by Charles Courtry, also 
represented by original work elsewhere in the volume. 

The names one misses most in looking down the list 
of poets and artists represented in Sonnets et Eaux- 
fortes, are those of Charles Meryon and Charles Baude- 
laire. Both had died, insane, before the book was even 
projected, so that they missed this opportunity for a 
collaboration which, it will be recalled, was at one time 

49 



seriously contemplated in connection with the proposed 
publication of Meryon's Eaux-fortes sur Paris. Meryon's 
place is scarcely filled by his imitator, Louis Armand 
Queyroy, who published views of Vendome and of the 
streets and houses of old Blois in a physical dress that at 
once suggests Meryon, and to whom Victor Hugo had 
written (as he had previously written to Meryon and as 
he habitually wrote to all artists who sent him their 
work, with the same facile flattery that deprived his 
recognition of all critical value): u C'est la fidelite photo- 
graphiqiie avec la liberte du grand art." There is more of 
photography than of great art in Queyroy's work, but 
it is not without a merit, little trace of which, however, 
appears in his illustration for he Sphinx, by Henri 
Cazalis. 

Meryon and Baudelaire are absent, but there is 
plentiful, if not always adequate, representation of 
other major poets and etchers of the period, though, 
unfortunately, their names rarely occur in conjunction. 
Thus, among the poets of the first romantic generation, 
there is Theophile Gautier, whose Promenade hors des 
murs, showing Dr. Faustus and his famulus Wagner 
sitting moodily apart from their fellow-citizens on a 
festal occasion, is illustrated by the Belgian, Baron 
Leys. Leys produced many similar scenes of Flemish 
mediaeval life, which were popular in Paris for a time, 
probably for the same reason that Victor Hugo's Notre 
Dame de Paris was hailed as a masterpiece of fiction. 
But Beraldi's judgment that, aside from his selection of 
subjects, where the French artist is admitted to have 
the advantage (though on precisely what grounds, other 
than sentimental, is not clearly stated), Leys is the equal 
of Millet, is one of the curiosities of criticism. On the 

50 




Courtry (After Victor Hugo). L'Eclair 
Size of the original etching, 8% X 5% inches 




Leys. Promenade hors des Murs 
Size of the original etching, 7% X 5% inches 



other hand, Sainte-Beuve's sonnet on Le Pont des Arts, 
was assigned to Maxime Lalanne, a not unworthy allot- 
ment, although that excellent etcher's work in this 
instance is rather hard and mechanical. The third of 
these older poets, Auguste Barbier, famous for his 
political invectives, had the misfortune to fall to the lot 
of un nomme Giacomotti, who contributed a caricature 
of Botticelli's Nascita di Venere to accompany a sonnet 
celebrating To KaXoV. 

Prominent among the poets of the second romantic 
generation is Leconte de Lisle who drew one of the most 
workmanlike of the younger etchers, Leopold Flameng, 
but his subject, Combat Homerique, presented an almost 
impossible problem for an etcher, and the result is a 
weak and empty outline drawing somewhat in the man- 
ner of Flaxman. Theodore de Banville's Promenade 
Galante, is depicted by Edmond Morin, who has a place 
in the history of French illustration in the 19th century 
as heritor of the ideals of elegance and refinement from 
Eisen, Cochin, and Marillier, though more languid and 
sentimental, but who is hardly of importance as an 
etcher. The same is true of C61estin Nanteuil, who inter- 
prets Louis Bouilhet's Le Sang des Geants, in a hard, 
dry, and matter-of-fact manner, and gives little evidence 
of that stormy fugue with which he was popularly sup- 
posed to produce his famous eaux-fortes noires, when he 
was the romantic illustrator and engraver par excellence, 
and used, so the legend ran, to shout to his assistants, as 
his fury was excited by the fumes of the acid, to bite his 
plates till they " cracked" (crevaient). 

Nanteuil was a youth of only seventeen when he 
escaped from his art school in 1830 to join the band 
of Les Jeunes, who accompanied their demigod Victor 

51 



Hugo to and from the theatre, and formed a faithful 
phalanx to applaud the first production of Hernani. 
"Jeune homme moy en-age," he was called playfully by 
Gautier in those days, and it was from a mixture of the 
Middle Ages and the Renaissance that, as Beraldi says, 
he invented that illustrative formula which he applied 
with such contemporary success to works by Victor 
Hugo, Dumas, Petrus Borel, and Paul de Kock. But 
his was a shallow though showy talent, and the passing 
of romanticism left him stranded. He lived to regret 
the wasted time and facile triumphs of his youth, which 
apparently he felt had frustrated the more serious artistic 
triumphs fate once held in store for him — though 
doubtless this was no less an illusion than that which 
led him after the romantic will-o'-the-wisp. At all events, 
Beraldi tells us that when, about this time, Philippe 
Burty, friend and interpreter of Meryon, visited Nanteuil 
in his studio, " he found him little disposed to anecdote 
and of a haughty and reserved air" — the air of a man 
who has failed, and attributes his failure to the fault 
of others and an adverse fate. 

A pupil of NanteuiPs was Edmond Hedouin who, like 
Morin, was noted for his fashionable elegance and 
grace, and who illustrated Sully-Prudhomme's sonnet, 
Silence et Nuit des Bois; while among the other illustra- 
tors may be mentioned Emile Boilvin, also a painter, 
who has little opportunity to display his affected pretti- 
ness in Jean Vireton's Rabelaisian episode, Apres la 
Harangue: Felix Regamey, a caricaturist, who visited 
and worked in both England and America, and who 
made, as far as Beraldi's records show, only the one 
etching which here accompanies the unfortunate Albert 
Glatigny's Le Roman Comique; Gustave Jundt, who 

52 



illustrated many children's books, and who contributes 
a rather clever costume and character drawing for 
Emmanuel des Essarts' Les Incroyables — dandies of 
the Directoire period — and, of course, Gustave Dore, 
whose study of a lion for Leon Cladel's sonnet on that 
beast, reminds us of van Muyden, though it is not so 
well drawn, being quite flat and without bones or bulk 
in the body. 

It was apparently Dore's first experiment with the 
needle, for Beraldi dates the real awakening of his 
interest in etching from a period three years later, or 
1872. He then became very enthusiastic and produced 
some fifty-four plates dealing with a variety of subjects, 
and including several life-sized heads of Christ, one of 
which he is said to have executed in less than an hour; 
for he worked as rapidly with the needle on copper as he 
did with the pencil on the woodblock. According to 
Beraldi, Dore rarely bit his own plates; but sometimes 
he did so, and the printer Salmon has told how the art- 
ist's valet, who took a personal interest in his master's 
pursuits, used to rush into the printing office exclaim- 
ing: "Here is another plate that Monsieur and I have 
just finished!" 

Dore's productivity in what, after all, remained for 
him an alien medium, contrasts with Gerome's total 
output of four etchings, one of which is the very slight 
and tentative sketch for Anatole France's Un Senateur 
Romain. Other painters who produced a few plates 
only, were Jules Hereau, paired with Laurent-Pichart 
{Reverie)\ Auguste Feyen-Perrin, with Armande Sil- 
vestre {Nenuphars)) Emile Levy, with Autran {Le 
Masque) ; Victor Ranvier, with Emile Deschamps 
{Dernier Mirage). 

53 



The poets mentioned in the preceding paragraphs 
were all, or nearly all, of the youngest, neo-romantic, or 
Parnassian, generation. To them should be added cer- 
tain others. For example, there is Jean Aicard, to-day a 
member of the French Academy, and better known as 
a writer of humorous picaresque novels dealing with the 
adventures of one Maurin, than as a poet. His sonnet, 
La Mer, on the other hand, was illustrated by one of the 
older etchers, Leon Gaucherel, who instructed so many 
pupils in the art — Flameng was one of them — that 
he was called by some admirers the "father of etching" 
— "let us say uncle, rather," remarked one dissenter. 
As a matter of fact, Gaucherel was an excellent crafts- 
man rather than an artist in the strict sense, and did his 
best work on plates that exhibit his skill as an architec- 
tural draughtsman and decorative designer. The speci- 
men of his original work shown here is weak and ama- 
teurish. Nor is that sound reproductive etcher, Charles 
Courtry, seen to the best advantage in his plate for 
Francois CoppeVs Fits de Louis XI. Coppee was the 
first of the new poets to win fame and to attract attention 
to the little group of which he was one of the original 
or "charter" members. To this, as we have seen, also 
belonged Catulle Mendes and Louis-Xavier Ricard. 
Both chose feminine subjects — Theodora and Theroigne 
de Mericourt — which were illustrated by Ingomar 
Frankel and Victor Giraud, respectively; while the Eng- 
lish artist, Edward Edwards, who was so highly praised 
by his contemporaries, including Haden and Whistler, 
was associated with the poet Edouard Grenier in a 
maritime subject, the wreck of La Sulina; L.-M. Solon, 
an industrial artist attached to the French governmental 
works at Sevres, with Leon Valade (La Chute) ; Tancrede 

54 




Ribot. Une Grande Douleur 
Size of the original etching, 7% X 4% inches 



Abraham, with Arsene Houssaye (Le Pays Inconnu); 
and Francois-Louis Francais, with Victor de la Prade 
(Au Bord du Putts). 

Not Gaucherel, but Jacque, is the real " father of 
French etching." He perhaps it is, who, for this reason, 
is most missed in the present collection among the 
artist contributors. Whistler, Legros, and Appian are, 
however, also important absentees. But, on the other 
hand, here are Corot and Millet, Haden and Daubigny, 
Manet and Jongkind, Bracquemond and Jacquemart, 
Raj on and Veyrassat, and several other excellent artists 
or skillful craftsman, though they are by no means all 
represented by their best work. Thus Corot's Pay sage 
Normand (for a poem by Andre Lemoyne), afterwards 
published under the title of Dans les Dunes; Souvenir des 
Bois da la Haye is thoroughly charming and characteris- 
tic, as are also Millet's study of a peasant girl with a 
spindle tending goats, for a poem by Albert Merat, and 
Jongkind's winter scene, with skaters, on a Dutch canal, 
Batavia — the more interesting of two studies which he 
made of this subject — for one by Robert Luzarche. 
Bracquemond's L'Eclipse, to the words of the elder 
romantic poet, Auguste Vacquerie is a rather piquant 
conception realized with considerable feeling for design, 
while Beraldi calls Ribot's Une Grande Douleur, which 
shows Josephin Soulary's ouvrier mourning over a 
broken pipe, that artist's best work on copper. 

But Haden' s treatment of trees and of light and 
shade on the forest floor in La Rookery 1 (Ernest d'Her- 
villy), is in that extravagantly blurred and blotted style 
that stirred Ruskin's wrath, and suggests Chinese 

1 In both Drake's and Harrington's catalogues of Seymour Ha- 
den's work this plate is called " The Herd " 

55 



"bunginja," or mandarin, art. Manet's Fleur Exotique 
(Armand Renaud) is too obviously an imitation — and 
a superficial imitation — of Goya. Daubigny's Le 
Verger, while entirely expressive of the sentimental 
spirit of Gabriel Marc's text, is hardly on a level with 
his highest achievements in painter-etching. Jacque- 
mart's La Pivoine, for a sonnet by Judith Gautier, 
daughter of Theophile, and the only woman represented 
in the collection — is an insipid japonaiserie without 
such delicacy in the drawing as we would have expected 
from this master of still life. Rajon's Le Pitre (Paul 
Verlaine), in spite of its technical competence, is a 
triviality of the illustrated papers; and Veyrassat's 
Supplice de Judas dans VEnfer (Antoni Deschamps) , is a 
crude attempt to treat an imaginative subject somewhat 
outside the proper domain of etching. 

From such failures, or comparative failures, of recog- 
nized masters, it is pleasant to pass to the successes, or 
at least the intelligent attempts, of lesser-known men. 
G. Howard, for example, in his study of windswept trees 
on a hillside, for Revolte, by Leon Dierx — latest and 
almost the last of the prominent Parnassians to pass 
away — shows a perception of the painter-etcher's true 
linear method superior to that of some of his better- 
known contemporaries; Jules Michelin, in Souvenir du 
Bas-Breau (Andre Theuriet), if less poetical and imagi- 
native, brings to the realization of his intentions a more 
complete mastery of medium and method (his treatment 
of trees reminds us at times of Storm van's Gravesande 
in certain of the latter's woodland studies) ; and Lansyer, 
in La Fontaine (George Lafenestre), seems to have 
come under the classical influence of Nicholas Berchem 
and Claude Lorrain. 

56 




o 



Altogether it will be seen that Sonnets et Eaux-fortes 
has historical interest rather than artistic value of a 
high order. The opportunity offered, it might seem, by 
the ingenious plan of the publication, was by no means 
improved to the fullest extent. Not that the artists them- 
selves were entirely responsible for the failure of so inter- 
esting an experiment. Some were, indeed, poor etchers, 
without sufficient practice in the art or knowledge of 
its principles, while others were not so much artists as 
skillful craftsmen, incapable of important creative effort. 
But several were set tasks which, if not impossible, 
were, at any rate, difficult and ill-adapted to the display 
of the best possibilities of the medium. But the ultimate 
reason for the slight and disappointing results is doubt- 
less to be sought in the obligation imposed upon the 
artist to realize the idea of another rather than his own 
— to become an illustrator — and this in the most 
intensely personal and spontaneous of mediums. It is 
therefore not remarkable that, after all, those who suc- 
ceeded best in the present undertaking were not always 
the most accomplished etchers, or even the finest artists, 
but often merely those who had a special talent for illus- 
tration, and were men of clever attainments rather than 
of genius. 

But if the artistic level of Sonnets et Eaux-fortes is not 
high, its contents are at least varied and interesting, and 
represent a wide range of tastes and talents. On the 
whole, moreover, the prints are quite worthy of the 
poems which they accompany, and the majority of which 
are anecdotal or descriptive trifles. There are few really 
fine sonnets among them, and there is no particular 
reason why the greater number should have been cast 
in sonnet, rather than in any other, form. Some of the 

57 



younger authors were, in after years, to achieve a fame 
as conspicuous as that then enjoyed by their elders — 
but not, as in the case of Verlaine, for example, through 
the sort of work by which they are represented in Sonnets 
et Eanx-fortes. This, as we have said, was a virtual 
continuation of Parnasse Contemporain, the publication 
primarily, of a school. But, writes M. Remy de Gour- 
mont, in the study of Dierx alluded to above, "of all 
these poets of Parnassus, none was popular or even 
known to the public in so far as he was Parnassian, that 
is to say, impassible and impeccable. The reason is, 
that they all had, in these years — this is true even of 
Coppee and Verlaine — an attitude of painter-decora- 
tors. They described life, above all in its brilliant and 
picturesque parts, and disdained to participate in it 
otherwise than by very lofty illusions." 

It is this sort of painter decorating — if not painter- 
etching! — that dominates Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. 




Manet. Fleur Exotique 
Size of the original etching, 6%X4i£ inches 




V 

THE GONCOURTS AND THEIR CIRCLE 

[0 WHERE is the teeming intellectual and 
artistic life of the second half of the XlXth 
Century in France found so completely 
focussed and concentrated as it is in the 
famous Journal des Goncourts. The brothers began it 
in 1851, the year of the Coup d'etat, — the year also 
when they published their first novel, whose failure 
they were always inclined to attribute, half seriously, 
to the fatal effects of that political event in diverting 
public attention from their maiden effort, — and 
Edmond, who outlived Jules by a quarter of a cen- 
tury, continued it down to 1895, the year of his 
literary " Jubilee." 

In this half-century they witnessed the decline of 
Romanticism both in art and in literature, and helped 
to shape the new movement of Naturalism which sup- 
planted it; while Edmond, in the early eighties, was one 
of the first to recognize at once the aims and the methods 
of Impressionism in painting. These, indeed, he himself 
had already practiced in his later prose fiction — partly , 
at least, as the result of his study of Japanese art, 
which he was among the first to initiate in Europe, just 
as he and his brother had already led in a revival of 
interest in the art of the XVIIIth Century. 

59 



Champions of light and color in painting, they were 
also ardent amateurs of black and white in the arts 
of design. No one appreciated more thoroughly the 
artistic value of etching and lithography, or better un- 
derstood their limitations and possibilities. Nearly all 
the principal etchers, lithographers, and even book- 
illustrators, — who at that period still continued to 
draw their designs upon the wood block, — were their 
friends and acquaintances — members of that great 
and ever-extending circle which, in the course of time, 
came almost to coincide with the upper art-world of 
Paris. 

It is on this personal side that the Journal with its 
day-to-day record of encounters, conversations, criti- 
cism, and illuminating anecdote, is above all inter- 
esting. The Goncourts were distinguished artists and 
competent critics of art. But, through their intense self- 
conscious absorption in all that immediately pertained 
to themselves and to their contemporaries, they be- 
came, in their loose, scattered, and often trivial-seeming 
chronicle, more than all else, the spiritual historians of 
their epoch. 



Both Edmond and Jules de Goncourt had studied art 
before they turned their talents to literature, and they 
never entirely lost touch with the Bohemian artistic life 
of Paris as described by the Romantic writer, Henri 
Murger, in his Scenes de la vie de Boheme. 

Having in mind, perhaps, Murger's own grim and 
grewsome end, than which the rigid moralist could de- 
mand no better commentary on the dangers of the Bo- 

60 



^i r $jji ' i 







Gavarni. Edmond and Jules de Goncoxjrt 
From Messieurs du Feuilleton 



hemian ideal, the Goncourts themselves gave in Ma- 
nette Salomon, an account of conditions in the Quartier 
that, while scarcely less fascinating, is considerably less 
couleur de rose. It is, moreover, a bitter statement of the 
terms on which success is achieved by the artist in our 
own time, since the only character who is thoroughly 
successful is a painter who deliberately sacrifices every- 
thing to obtain official recognition; while both the 
heroes — the one with too much talent as well as the 
other without any — end in common failure. 

The model for the latter, the whimsical Anatole, was 
found by the brothers in an artist named Pouthier, who 
had been Edmond's companion at college, and who actu- 
ally prolonged for many a year in Paris the miserable ex- 
istence attributed to his fictional counterpart. As for 
Naz de Coriolis, the attempt was apparently to create 
in him the ideal type of the great artists of the Roman- 
tic period. 1 

Like Decamps, Delacroix, and so many others, Cori- 
olis was an Orientalist. But his talent had also another, 
prophetic, side. He looked to the future as well as to the 
past. And in his attempt to represent the scenes of 
contemporary life, he was as modern as any of the great 
painters of the latter part of the century. Such clair- 
voyance naturally does credit to the judgment and 
perspicacity of a writer, and it is with pardonable pride 
that Edmond de Goncourt, writing in 1874 of Degas' 
then newly established preference for laundresses and 
ballet dancers, says : — 

"I cannot find his choice bad, since I myself, in 

1 In the sixth volume of the Journal, Edmond de Goncourt speaks of 
Beaulieu, "le peintre des feux de Bengale," whose studio he had given 
in Manette Salomon. Coriolis was also a " peintre des feux de Bengale " 
at one period. 

61 



Manette Salomon, have sung the praises of these two 
professions, as furnishing the best models of modern 
women for a contemporary artist. In fact," he goes on 
to give a characteristic color note of his own, " there is 
in the rose of the flesh, in the white of the linen, in the 
milky mist of the gauzes, the most charming pretext 
for blond and tender colorations." 

Those who have read Manette Salomon will recall how 
Coriolis, balked in his ambition to achieve a great career, 
turned to etching, and found in that art a sort of ano- 
dyne for his mood of disillusionment and despair. The 
Goncourts followed the artistic currents and tenden- 
cies of their own time too closely not to note, in the 
preoccupation of painters in the minor art of etching, a 
characteristic trait of the period. But the passage has 
a personal, autobiographical, as well as a general, in- 
terest. 

"All these last days," writes Jules under date of 
March, 1859, "we see no one, our thought and attention 
deeply plunged in the eau-forte. Nothing so completely 
occupies one, takes him out of himself, as these me- 
chanical distractions." 

Both Edmond and Jules practiced etching to a cer- 
tain extent. They saw in it, primarily, as they said, 
an outil aV immortalisation, for the graphic side of those 
eighteenth-century subjects on which they were then 
engaged. But they also maintained an independent 
artistic interest in the medium for its own sake, and 
after Jules' death, in 1870, Edmond arranged for the 
publication of a portfolio containing twenty of his 
brother's plates, for which Burty wrote a preface and 
prepared a catalogue. 

Philippe Burty, critic and historian of the graphic 

62 



arts, and fine connoisseur of prints, early met the Gon- 
courts and became a member of their circle. 

"We have passed the day at Burty's," wrote the 
latter some time in 1865. " An interior of art," is the 
way they characterized the quarters of this ardent col- 
lector, crowded "with books, lithographs, painted 
sketches, drawings, faiences; a small garden; women; 
a little girl ; a little dog, and long hours spent turning 
over the prints in card-board boxes lightly brushed by 
by the dress of a stout, lively, young singer. . . . An 
atmosphere of cordiality, of good fellowship, of happy 
family, which makes one think of those artistic bour- 
geois households of the eighteenth century. It is a little 
such a laughing and luminous house as one imagines 
to have been the abode of Fragonard." 

So far as I know, the Goncourts never met Meryon, of 
whom their friend Burty was, with Baudelaire, the co- 
discoverer, though they knew and admired his work, 
writing concerning it a page of appreciation that no 
one — not even Hugo or Baudelaire — has surpassed: — 

"Studied," they write one day, "at Mel's the work of 
Meryon in all its states, its trials, and even a number of 
his designs. It seems as if a hand of the past had held the 
point of the graver, and that something better than the stones 
of old Paris had descended upon these leaves of paper. Yes, 
in these images, one would say that there had been resusci- 
tated a little of the soul of the old city; it is, as it were, a 
magic reminiscence of old quarters foundering sometimes 
in the troubled dream of the brain of the visionary poet- 
artist who had seated at his sides Madness and Misery. 

"Poor, miserable madman," they add some lines 
further along, after giving details of his sufferings and 
hallucinations, often erotic or obscene, "poor, miserable 

63 



madman, who, in the lucid intervals of his mania, takes, 
at night, interminable walks in order to surprise the 
picturesque strangeness of the shadows in great cities." 

II 

If Meryon represented the culmination of the Ro- 
mantic tradition in French etching, Celestin Nanteuil, 
fed on Piranesi, may be called one of its originators. 

Nanteuil was one of the "Men of 1830," though be- 
longing rather to the literary, rather than to the artistic, 
group thus commonly designated, and was closely allied 
with Hugo and Gautier in all the public manifestations 
of the first Romantic period. He was, above all, a book 
illustrator, and it was from such work that he long made 
his livelihood. But by 1860 the illustrated book had 
largely gone out of fashion in France, and when the 
Goncourts met him, he was already fearful of the future. 
Indeed, there is little doubt that he would have faced the 
prospect of a destitute old age, if official employment 
had not providentially been found for him in a provincial 
museum. 

The Goncourts apparently never knew any of the 
Barbizon group of painters who were the real "Men of 
1830," in the artistic acceptation of the term. At least, 
if they did, there is no record of it in the Journal, al- 
though their friend Leroy, the engraver, was a perfect 
mine of anecdotes concerning them. But once, when 
they had accompanied Leroy to the seashore, at Veules, 
they met Jacque, who came to spend a day in their 
company. 

"He was dressed," they recorded, "in black, and 
wore a stove-pipe hat that he never took off even 

64 



when he painted and ate. He drew from his pocket a 
little album, the size of a visiting card, on which he 
showed us twenty geometrical lines representing the 
horizons he had noted during the last ten days. He, 
the skillful and witty sketcher, the brilliant and 
learned aquafortist, the master of the pig, affects doc- 
torally to repudiate all tricks, all formulas, all manual 
dexterities — all the things of which his own little, 
but very real, talent is composed — going so far as 
to esteem only the primitive masters, the spiritual 
masters, and to recognize in the modern school but one 
man: M. Ingres." 

If it is thought that the Goncourts did, on the whole, 
rather less than justice to the man who brought the in- 
fluence of Rembrandt back into modern etching, they 
certainly cannot be accused of slighting the English 
etcher who continued his work in England and America. 
This was Seymour Haden, whose art won the highest 
admiration of the brothers. Indeed, Edmond de Gon- 
court once wrote of Haden's plate, Sunset in Ireland, 
that he regarded it as one of the most remarkable mod- 
ern etchings — one in which the artist, "who recov- 
ered the velvety black of Rembrandt, has, as it were, 
imprinted on a sheet of paper, the melancholy senti- 
ment of the twilight hour." 

But the main admiration of the brothers for an art- 
ist of their own time, was reserved for one of whom it 
is difficult to say whether they valued most highly the 
man himself or his work. This was Gavarni. 

The great designer, who was a still greater satirist, 
and whose lithographs, as they appeared week after 
week in Le Charivari, had been studied, and even copied, 
by the Goncourts while they were still, as it were, in 

65 



the nursery, had had no small share in shaping their 
own artistic and spiritual development. Seduced by 
what they themselves describe as "that habitual figura- 
tion of pleasure, of love, of Parisian life, that depiction 
of manners caught in their vain or cynical verity, that 
mordant exposition of Parisian vice," which they found 
in Gavarni, they were tortured to achieve an equal 
truth of observation, combined with an equal concise- 
ness and elegance of expression, in the treatment of sim- 
ilar subjects drawn from the as yet scarcely suspected 
treasures of modern life. 

As for the man himself, he attracted them by a per- 
sonal distinction which was, in the main, that of the es- 
sential " Dandy" as defined by Barbey d'Aurevilly and 
realized by Merimee. But with this there was mixed 
something darkly mysterious, almost Machiavellian, 
which suggested the malignant Marquis of Les liai- 
sons danger euses. 

Gavarni was about fifty years old when the brothers 
made his acquaintance under circumstances which 
they describe both in their book, Gavarni: Vhomme et 
son ceuvre, and in the opening pages of the Journal. 
But tall, slender, supple, athletic, with upturned mous- 
taches and a military overcoat buttoned to the chin, he 
had much more the appearance of a man of thirty, es- 
pecially as the red color of his hair tended to conceal 
the gray beginning to be scattered through it. 

He had been married, but his wife was dead, and he 
now lived a solitary life in a quaint little old house, with 
a garden, at Point-du-Jour, on the road to Versailles. 
He was an indefatigable worker. Indeed, he himself 
said that his life consisted of work and of women. But 
he had another passion nearly, if not quite, as strong as 




" Gavarni" 
(Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier) 



either of the others. This was abstract mathematical 
science, which he claimed was the most immaterial of 
all the arts. 

"Even in music," he said, "there is the beating of the 
sonorous waves against the tympanum. Mathematics 
is the mute music of numbers /" 

In 1851, the Goncourts' cousin, the Comte de VihV 
deuil, a young man just out of college, came to Paris, 
where he started a paper called L'Eclair, with the 
collaboration of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, then 
twenty-nine and twenty-two years old respectively. 
Meeting with little success — finding, indeed, the great- 
est difficulty in keeping afloat — they decided, if possi- 
ble, to interest Gavarni in their undertaking. 

It seemed an audacious idea. The artist was then at 
the very zenith of his great reputation. The three kins- 
men were, on the contrary, just beginning to make their 
modest debut in the world of letters, the Goncourts hav- 
ing published, at this time, but one, unsuccessful, novel. 
But perhaps it was their very audacity that pleased the 
older man. At any rate, when they met at dinner, for 
the first time, at the Maison d'Or, he proposed for their 
publication the series of the Manteau d'Arlequin. 

Furthermore, he signified a desire to extend the ac- 
quaintance thus begun, by inviting them to call. This 
they did a few days later, and Gavarni showed them 
through the old house, with its grim wall and rusty 
grills on the street, which had been a counterfeiters' den 
under the Directoire. Later it had been acquired by 
Josephine's modiste, Leroy, who used the iron chamber, 
where the false coin had been manufactured, to press 
Napoleon's mantles, embroidered with golden bees. 

To this house they returned many times. There, in 

67 



his cheerful garden atelier, they watched the master at 
work and listened while he told stories of Balzac, Dau- 
mier, and others with whom he had been associated in 
his earlier years or while, in pungent aphorisms that had 
the epigrammatic concision and grace of the legends 
which he traced beneath his pictures, he expressed his 
philosophy of art and of life. 

Once he dwelt upon his indifference towards the fait 
accompli in art. 

"Idoa thing," he said, "only because of its difficul- 
ties, and because it is not easy to do. Take my garden 
for example. When it is done, I shall gladly make a gift 
of it to some one. There are those who paint landscapes. 
I amuse myself by making landscapes in relief. Well, 
what is it you want me to do with a design once it 
is finished? There is nothing left to do but to give it 
away." 

Again, speaking of the theatre, he asked: — 

"Have you ever watched, not the stage, but the 
theatre itself, during a performance? I do not know how, 
after having seen that spectacle, one has the courage 
to go on addressing the public. . . . Man at least makes 
the acquaintance of a book in solitude. But a play is ap- 
preciated by a raw mass of humanity, an agglomerated 
stupidity." 

Then, leaving this subject, after a silence in which 
he remained for a moment lost in his reflections, he 
cried: — 

"Ah! scientific research — that is a fine monomania 
for you. Now, whether I make one lithograph more or 
less does not count greatly for my renown. But, instead, 
if there were a theorem which bore my name — hein, 
that would be something like, would it not?" 

68 



Ill 

At Gavarni's occasionally they found other artists. 
Once it was Bracquemond, with whom the master of the 
house was engaged in tripotant "some eaux-fortes . . . 
in sketching with the point on the copper a series of 
celebrities, among which he shows us a Balzac of ad- 
mirable workmanship." Then all four, the day's work 
done, went off to dine at a little restaurant. 

Another time it was Constantin Guys, the staff artist 
of the Illustrated London News, who had reported the 
Crimean War so brilliantly for that paper. 

"A little man with a face expressing energy, with 
gray moustaches, with the aspect of a grognard; limping 
a trifle as he walked, and continually drawing up his 
sleeves with the flat of his hand on his bony arms; dif- 
fuse in his talk, trailing off into parentheses, zigzagging 
from one idea to another, getting off the track, lost, but- 
finding himself again and regaining your attention with 
a metaphorical bit of gutter-slang, a word borrowed 
from the terminology of German thinkers, a technical 
term from some art or industry, and always holding you 
under the impact of his highly colored speech which 
made everything, as it were, visible to the eyes. And 
there were a thousand souvenirs that he evoked during 
this walk, casting among them, from time to time, hand- 
fuls of ironies, of sketches, of landscapes, of bloody, 
disemboweled cities perforated with bullets, of hospi- 
tals where the rats gnawed the wounded. 

" Then, on the reverse of this, as in an album, or as, on 
the back of a drawing by Decamps, you find a thought 
by Balzac, there issue from the mouth of this devil of a 

69 



man, social silhouettes, apergus on the French species, 
or on the English species, all quite new, which have not 
grown stale in a book — two-minute satires, pamphlets 
in a single word, a comparative philosophy of the na- 
tional genius of peoples." 

Both Bracquemond and Guys henceforth became 
members of the Goncourts' circle, the former making the 
well-known head of Edmond, which is one of the greatest 
of modern portrait etchings. 

Meanwhile this circle was becoming extended on the 
literary side. The stream of novels and eighteenth-cen- 
tury studies that flowed from the pens of these inde- 
fatigable brothers, began to attract attention. They had 
already met and joined forces with Gautier, Banville, 
and Flaubert, when one day, in 1861, Sainte-Beuve, the 
Grand Sultan of Criticism, came to call on them. 

Through the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve and Gavarni 
soon entered into closer relations, with important re- 
sults for the history of French literature in the latter 
half of the XlXth Century. For the following year, 
these two men, who conceived a relish for each other's 
conversation , despite a constant malentendu on the sub- 
ject of art, organized at Magny's a fortnightly dinner 
destined to become the last great cenacle of the century. 

It began modestly enough, with only six members: 
Gavarni, Sainte-Beuve, Veyne, de Chennevierres, and 
the two Goncourts. But it grew rapidly, and its mem- 
bership soon came to include such representative think- 
ers and men of letters as Taine, Renan, Gautier, Flau- 
bert, Saint- Victor, Turgenieff, Sherer, and the great 
synthetic chemist, Bert helot. 

Here, at one table, surrounded by men of two genera- 
tions, the great tradition of French letters may be said 

70 




Bracquemond. Edmond de Goncotjrt 
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 



to have been directly continued. For here, from the dy- 
ing embers of Romanticism, emerged the new spirit of 
Naturalism, of which Flaubert was the Paraclete, Taine 
the prophet, and the Goncourts themselves were the 
apostles and pioneers — also, as they liked to think, the 
"martyrs." 

This celebrated and epoch-making cenacle, continued 
until 1870, when, of the six original members, three — 
Gavarni, Sainte-Beuve, and Jules de Goncourt — died. 
It was revived after the war, in 1872, on the occasion of 
the hundredth performance of Hugo's Ruy Bias, but 
with only indifferent success. And, for the reader of the 
Journal, interest, after 1870, rather tends to center in 
the younger group which gradually grew up around 
Edmond de Goncourt. 

In this the leaders were Daudet and Zola. 1 The latter 
brought with him his co-disciples of Les soirees de 
Medan — Maupassant, Huysmans, Ceard, Hennique, 
Alexis — and the gatherings in Goncourt 's Grenier 
were augmented from time to time, by a number of 
other writers — Octave Mirbeau, Abel Hermant, Jean 
Lorrain, the Belgian poet-novelist Georges Rodenbach, 
Lucien Descaves, Margueritte, Rosny, Charpentier, and 
many others, of all literary generations right down to 
the very latest represented by Leon Daudet, son of the 
author of Sapho and Tartarin. 

IV 

From about 1870, new names of artists begin to ap- 
pear in the Journal, also. There is Ziem, for example, 

1 Goncourt, Flaubert, Turgenieff, Daudet and Zola soon formed the 
monthly " Diner des cinq." 

71 



the painter of Venice, who first captures Goncourt's at- 
tention because he has studied on the spot the perspec- 
tives of Giotto, and can compare the procedes of the 
primitifs with those of the Japanese artists. 

Then, of special interest to the future author of mono- 
graphs on Hokusai and Utamaro, there is a real Japan- 
ese painter, Watanobe-Sei, who gives a demonstration 
of the traditional methods of his race, by executing a 
great kakemono at Burty's before a select assistance. 

Burty also takes him to see the young sculptor, Cros, 
who is making a wax figure of his daughter. Felicien 
Rops (an old acquaintance, this one) comes to lunch 
with him. He calls on Marcellin (a former classmate), 
caricaturist and director of La Vie Parisienne, who 
has asked him to write an article on Gavarni. He spends 
pleasant evenings with young Pierre Gavarni and his 
wife. He meets the two illustrators, of such unequal 
value as artists, Vierge and Dore, and he talks at Bra- 
bant's with that pauvre Fromentin, so soon to die, his 
work unfinished, who confides to him that, if he had no 
one dependent upon him, he would "chuck" painting 
altogether, and turn his attention entirely to literature. 

A frequent companion is Claudius Popelin, a skilled 
art-worker, also a poet, who executed a portrait of Jules 
de Goncourt in enamel. Edmond himself goes one day 
to the studio of an unknown artist whose dry-points he 
has admired at Burty's and who has offered to make his 
portrait in the same medium. Shortly after, Bracque- 
mond makes his great etching of the writer. And a 
third portrait of the period is the one, life-size, made by 
the Neapolitan De Nittis, whom Goncourt loved, and 
whom he called "the true landscapist of the Parisian 
street." 

72 



By 1880 Paris was in the full flood of Impressionism, 
and Goncourt, quick to discern the new character of 
the period, as he was to sympathize with every new 
manifestation of the human spirit, exclaims: — 

" Ah! if I were younger, the fine novel there would be 
to write again on the world of art, making it altogether 
different from Manette Salmon, with a painter of the 
Avenue de Villiers, a Bohemian painter, living in the 
great world and in high life, like Forain, a reasoner on 
art, in the fashion of Degas and all the varieties of the 
Impressionist artist." 

We have seen how the latter's modernist programme 
appealed to him. But while he admires the former, he is 
far from seeing Forain a real successor to Gavarni. He 
had none of that artist's amenity of spirit mingled with 
the sharpness and acerbity of his satire, which spares no 
shame or suffering in its cruel disdain : — 

1 ' Ah ! the ferocious legend of Forain ! " he cries . ' ' No , 
Gavarni in his legends has not this implacability, and 
the sayings of Vireloque are tempered by a philosophy 
at once elevated and kind-hearted." 

For the rest Goncourt, who visits Forain in his studio 
and notes a resemblance to Daumier in his method of 
attack, seems somewhat undecided as to whether this 
painter of Parisian life is at his best when expressing 
his ideas on the lithographic stone, or when he is pro- 
jecting them through the sublimated delicacies of his 
subtly ironic speech. 

It is not until 1886 that Goncourt meets Rodin. It is 
then Bracquemond who takes the writer to call on the 
great sculptor : — 

" He is a man with coarse plebeian features, clear eyes 
blinking beneath sickly red lids, a long yellowish beard, 

73 



hair cropped close, a round head expressing a gentle 
and obstinate stubbornness — a man such as I imagine 
were the disciples of Jesus Christ." 

The year following, Geffroy brings Raffaelli to call on 
Goncourt (ostensibly to see the latter's drawings), and 
henceforth these two artists, Rodin and Raffaelli, be- 
come inmost members of the latter's circle. Others are 
Carriere, whom Goncourt calls "a crepuscular Velas- 
quez," Alfred Stevens, the Belgian feminist painter, and 
James Tissot, after his return from Jerusalem where he 
had gone to make the celebrated series of paintings rep- 
resenting Bible scenes in the Holy Land. 

Tissot had already, some years before, illustrated 
Goncourt's novel La Fille Elisa. He, too, had origin- 
ally aspired to interpret the chic graces of the Parisian 
woman. But in 1893 he brought to see Goncourt one 
who far surpassed anything he himself had achieved in 
that feminine field. This was Paul Helleu, a young man 
"with feverish eyes, a tormented physiognomy, to- 
gether with the skin and the black locks of a crow." 

"He has just made a dry-point of me," writes Gon- 
court, adding that Helleu was very much frightened, 
having dreamed all night that he had made a failure 
of the portrait, and that to get his hand in, — since he 
drew only women, — he had tried to sketch himself. 

"He works on uncovered copper with a diamond 
point which has a sharper turn on the metal than the 
steel, and boasts that he can make a figure 8. This 
diamond point, which comes from England, is, he says, 
the object of envy of all contemporary etchers, who 
turn diplomats to borrow it in order to get one like it 
made for themselves by a Parisian jeweller." 

Goncourt was now more than seventy years old, and 

74 




Helleu. Edmond de Goncourt 



it was becoming the fashion to solicit the privilege of 
making his portrait. Raffaelli had already made a great 
full-length for the Exposition, and now foreign artists 
actually visited Paris for the express purpose of fixing 
on paper, or on the copper-plate, their impression of his 
aristocratic features and rather melancholy expression. 
Thus Will Rothenstein crossed over from London in 
connection with a projected work entitled, Edmond and 
Jules de Goncourt (With Letters and Leaves from their 
Journal) , and Zilcken came down from Holland to make 
a characteristic dry-point; while at home, the French 
illustrator, Frederic Regamey included Goncourt in a 
series of portraits appearing in Le Matin, and the cari- 
caturist, Willette, made a sketch of him for the menu 
of his "Jubilee" banquet. This was held on February 
22, 1895. A year and a half later (July 16, 1896) he 
died. 




VI 

SOME FRENCH ARTISTS DURING THE 
SIEGE AND COMMUNE 



DMOND DE GONCOURT was in the print- 
room of the Bibliotheque Nationale when the 
war broke out in August, 1870. Through the 
window, he tells us in the lively, impression- 
istic pages of his Journal du Siege, he saw people running 
in the Rue Vivienne. Instinctively he pushed from him 
the illustrated work he was examining and, reaching 
the street, ran with the crowd. 

Whether he returned later and finished his perusal, 
he does not say. Profoundly impressionable, almost 
neurasthenic, this literary maniac, as he has been called, 
seems, on the whole, to have lived in a state of sur- 
excitation that must have rendered anything like con- 
secutive work on indifferent subjects difficult, if not 
impossible. 

But while he himself apparently spent most of his 
time wandering about the streets, meeting people, and 
making observations, there were, no doubt, those cap- 
able, like Goethe at Weimar and Kant at Konigsberg, 
in similar circumstances, of preserving their personal 
detachment in the midst of public misfortune. 

76 



Indeed, one is struck, in the Journal, by the account 
of Zola's call on Goncourt towards the end of August, 
when the tide of French fortunes on the frontier was at 
its lowest ebb. The future author of he Debacle talked 
exclusively of himself, sketching "a series of novels he 
wished to write, an epic in ten volumes involving the 
natural and social history of a family . . . with the ex- 
position of temperaments, characters, vices, and vir- 
tues, as developed by diverse environments and differ- 
entiated like the parts of a garden, 'with sun here, 
shade there.'" 

Already, it is seen, the fortunes of the Rougon-Mac- 
quart family were of far more acute personal concern to 
Zola than the fate of the French armies under Mac- 
Mahon and Bazaine. 

Other writers appear in Goncourt's gossiping pages, to 
create a semblance of literary life in a city which starva- 
tion was already beginning to stare in the face. There 
were, for example, those who, like Renan, Saint-Victor, 
Neffter, and the great chemist, Berthelot, met every 
week with Goncourt at Brebant's on the Boulevard for 
dinner and discussion. There was also the old, or elderly, 
Theophile Gautier, returning " broke" from beyond the 
Swiss frontier, and bemoaning his fate, which was al- 
ways to be the victim of revolutions. And there was 
Victor Hugo, whom the fall of the Empire had at last 
allowed to return from his long exile on the island of 
Guernsey. 

Of the younger Parisian artists and men of letters, 
those fit for military service were for the most part 
already with the colors or, like the debonnair Catulle 
Mendes — who came dressed in the uniform of a volun- 
teer to bid Goncourt good-bye on his way to the front — 

77 



were rapidly going there. Of these death took heavy 
toll; and among others, it cut off in his earliest prime one 
in whom Gautier declared French art had lost its unique 
hope of renewal. 

"I go this morning to the funeral of Regnault," writes 
Goncourt under date of Friday, January 27, 1871, in the 
Journal. "There is an enormous crowd. We lament 
above the body of this talented youth, the burial of 
France. It is horrible, this equality before the brutal 
death dealt by rifle or cannon, which strikes genius or 
imbecility, the precious life like that which is without 
worth." 

Gautier, who, like Goncourt, has also given us his 
Tableaux de Siege, describes in a croquis his meeting 
with Regnault for the first time only a few days before 
the fatal event. It was in the former's poor lodgings in 
Paris, to which the artist, with all his military accoutre- 
ments, was brought by a common friend acquainted 
with the long-standing wish of the two men to meet each 
other. Not noticing the lack of chairs, the painter, just 
back from North Africa, sat on the bed as on a divan, 
talking of Tangier and turning the pages of a complete 
copy of Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra, which 
Gautier had recently borrowed from Philippe Burty. 

There are those who think that, in times of great 
national stress or crisis, and specifically in wartime, a 
way should be found to relieve the creative artist, the 
leader of the intellectual elite, from his share of the 
common responsibility. The man of genius himself, 
however, has rarely taken this narrow view of his human 
obligations. 

Regnault held the Prix de Rome, and was thus exempt 
from military service. But, unwilling to profit by such a 

78 




Regnault. Automedon with the Horses of Achilles 

Size of the original painting, 10 feet 6 inches X 10 feet HVa inches 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 



privilege — feeling, as all high-minded men must at 
such a time, that genius, like nobility, imposes superior 
obligations — he abandoned the big studio he had just 
built at Tangier, and returned to Paris. Enlisting as a 
private, he was offered the rank of sous-lieutenant, which 
he refused characteristically on the ground that "his 
example would be more useful than his command." 

"Having decided to stand the fatigues and troubles of 
the soldier's trade, without flinching or seeking to avoid 
a single one," he wrote his captain, — " having de- 
cided to be the first at every task and the first under 
fire, I hope to encourage by my example those of my 
comrades who might be tempted to complain or to 
hesitate." 

There was the usual protracted period of inaction 
and suspense, hardest of all to bear. At length came 
the order to advance to the outposts. Two days later 
the battle began in the suburbs of Paris. 

"The day wore on," writes M. Roger Marx, who bet- 
ter than any one else has told the story, "and the strug- 
gle was still desperate before the wall of the Pare de 
Burzenval, where Regnault had fought since dawn. The 
ground was strewn with corpses, and still the wall was 
not won. The bugle sounds. It is the signal for retreat, 
the heartrending order to descend once more the slopes 
up which they had swept that morning with such enthu- 
siasm. The troops obey, but slowly, with sudden returns 
of rage. Regnault cannot decide to leave. It galls him 
to abandon the fight before firing his last cartridge." 

Suddenly his friend, Georges Clairin, who had scarcely 
been separated from his side all day, missed him from 
the ranks. Anxious, he made inquiries. But it was not 
until they had returned to the shelter of the bastions 

79 



that he found a soldier who had heard Regnault say: 
u Le temps de lacker mon dernier coup de fusil, et je vous 
rejoins," and had seen him fall behind. 

As soon as possible a search was instituted, and the 
body of the artist was found where he had fallen on his 
face, a bullet through the temple. 

II 

"Art has paid its debt to the fatherland without 
stint in this fatal war," wrote Gautier. "Its dearest 
children have fallen in the flower of their age, full of 
daring, of genius, of iron resolution, and the future of 
painting is perhaps for a long time compromised by their 
death." 

Another of these plus chers enfants was Victor Giraud, 
who came of a family of painters. Dying of fever con- 
tracted in camp, he expressed a noble envy of Regnault, 
who gained his glorious death on the field of honor. 

Past active military age, Puvis de Chavannes took no 
part in the actual fighting about Paris, but he did guard 
duty with the others on the ramparts, where he received 
his inspiration for two very remarkable compositions. 

"Monsieur Puvis de Chavannes," writes Gautier, 
"has brought back from the ramparts a superb design 
which he has had lithographed, one that recalls the grand 
but simple manner of the artist to whom we owe the 
magnificent frescoes . . . la Guerre, la Paix, le Travail, 
and le Repos. 

"A slender, graceful woman, in a long mourning gown, 
her hair arranged like a widow's, her right hand resting 
on a rifle with fixed bayonet, her left uplifted, her face 
less than profile, stands on the platform of a bastion. 

80 




Puvis de Chavannes. " La ville de Paris investie confie a 
l'air son appel a la France" 

Reproduced from the painting; by permission of Mrs. James R. Jesup 
and Mrs. Harry Harkness Flagler 




Puvis de Chavannes. "Echappe a la serre ennemie le message 

ATTENDU EXALTE LE CCEUR DE LA FIERE CITE " 

Reproduced from the painting by permission of Mrs. James R. Jesup 
and Mrs. Harry Harkness Flagler 



The folds of her black dress, breaking at her feet like 
the sharp folds of Gothic drapery, make her a pedestal 
which elevates her and adds to her elegance. 

"A little below her are seen cannon, tents, gabion- 
nades, pyramids of cannon-balls. From a fort whose 
silhouette shows it to be Mont-Valerien, smoke drifts in 
horizontal streaks, and in a corner of the sky, already 
blurred by the distance, fades the spherical bulk of a 
balloon, sole means of communication now left us with 
the outside world. 

"The symbolic figure, which might be real and repre- 
sent a portrait as well as a generalization, follows the 
balloon with a look of love and anxiety. This frail bark 
bears the burden of a great hope. 

" A legend is written at the bottom of the picture: — 

" La ville de Paris investie confie a Vair son appel a, la France. 

"This touching figure," adds Gautier, "demands as 
its pendant: 'Paris servant contre son cceur la colombe 
messagere qui apporte la bonne nouvelle! ' For the correct 
expression, M. Puvis de Chavannes has but to recall 
Mademoiselle Favart reciting ' Les Pigeons de la Repub- 
lique,' in her gown lustred like the plumage of a turtle- 
dove. It [this second design] will be his distraction when, 
next on guard, he sees, speeding across the sky, our 
feathered postmen pursued, but not caught, by the post- 
men of Monsieur de Bismarck." 

From the designs thus described, Puvis de Chavannes 
executed two noble panel paintings in brown mono- 
chrome, which have had a singular history. In 1873 or 
1874 they were sent to America as gifts to a lottery organ- 
ized to aid the sufferers from the Chicago fire, and were 
lost sight of. They have, however, quite recently come 

81 



to light again, and are herewith reproduced for the first 
time since their rediscovery. 



Ill 

"One of my friends," writes Gautier in December, 
"came to find me yesterday to take me to Bastion 85 
where, he said, I should see something interesting; but 
there was need of haste, for night comes quickly these 
sad December days, and, besides, a change of tempera- 
ture might destroy the object of our pilgrimage. So we 
started off in haste, cursing the slowness of our poor 
steed which slipped on the glazed surface of the snow 
... as we penetrated the deserted streets of the quarter 
beyond the Luxembourg and the Observatoire. . . . 

"We pursued our way past the great gray walls pla- 
carded with dingy posters, bizarre old abodes given over 
to the industries the elegant city banishes to its extreme 
outer limits, barracks built of pine boards, hospitals or 
shelters for the troops, dismantled enclosures of a tone 
which recalled that of drawings on tinted paper, rein- 
forced with China white, the clinging patches of snow 
representing the touches of gouache. . . . 

"Arriving at the road which runs round the ramparts, 
we abandoned our fiacre, whose horse could go no fur- 
ther, and my friend led me to the spot where we were to 
find the curiosity which he had promised me, and which, 
in fact, was well worth the journey to the bastion. 

"The 7th company of the 19th Battalion of the Na- 
tional Guard contains many painters and sculptors who, 
soon bored by the life, are eager to find some better 
occupation for their leisure, from one turn of sentry 
duty to another, than the eternal drawing of corks. 

82 




Falguiere. La Resistance 

Etched by Bracquemond from the statue in snow 

Size of the original etching, 8y 8 X 6M inches 

The New York Public Library 



Pipe, cigar, cigarette help them to burn time; discus- 
sions on art and politics occasionally kill more of it, but 
one cannot be forever smoking, talking, or sleeping. 

"Now the last three or four days a considerable quan- 
tity of snow has fallen. This is already half melted in the 
heart of Paris, but it still lies intact on the ramparts 
where it is more exposed to the cold wind which comes 
from the open country. And as there is always in the 
artist, whatever his age, an element of childishness and 
gaminerie, the sight of this lovely white covering at 
once suggested a snow-fight as a welcome distraction. 
Two sides were formed, and active hands had soon con- 
verted into projectiles the frozen, glittering flakes from 
the slopes of the talus. 

"The battle was about to begin when a voice cried: 
' Would n't it be better to make a statue with all these 
snowballs?' The idea made an immediate appeal, for 
MM. Falguiere, Moulin, and Chope happened to be on 
guard that day. They erected a sort of framework of 
cobblestones, and the artists — whom M. Chope gladly 
served as assistant — set to work, receiving from every 
side the hard-packed masses of snow passed up to them 
by their comrades." 

M. Falguiere made a statue of Resistance, and M. 
Moulin a colossal bust of la Republique. The former was 
"placed below a parapet, not far from the guard house, 
on the edge of the chemin de ronde, and facing the coun- 
try. The delicate artist to whom we owe the Vainqueur 
en combat de coqs, le Petit Martyre, and Ophelia, has not 
given his Resistance those robust, almost virile forms, 
those great muscles, a la Michelange, that, at first, the 
subject seems to demand. He has understood that it 
is here a question of a moral, rather than a physical 

83 



resistance, and instead of personifying it under the traits 
of a sort of female Hercules ready for the fray, he has 
given her the frail grace of a Parisienne of our own day. 

"La Resistance, seated or, rather, leaning against a 
rock, crosses her arms on her nude breast with an air of 
indomitable resolution. Her slender feet, the toes con- 
tracted, seem determined to take root in the very soil. 
With a haughty movement of her head, she has tossed 
back her hair, as if to exhibit to the foe her charming 
face, more terrible than that of the Medusa. On her lips 
plays the light smile of a heroic disdain, and, in the slight 
frown upon her brow, is concentrated the obstinacy of 
an eternal interdict. 

"At the base of this improvised statue, M. Falguiere 
has had the modesty to write in black letters on a bit of 
board : La Resistance. The inscription was not necessary. 
Anyone would interpret a figure expressing so stubborn 
an energy, even if unaccompanied by its snow cannon. 

"It is sad to think that the first warm breath will 
melt this masterpiece and make it disappear, but the 
artist has promised, as soon as he is off duty, to execute 
a sketch of wax or clay in order to conserve its ex- 
pression and movement." 

Moulin's statue was a colossal bust of La Republique. 
Placed on the highest part of the parapet, Gautier 
writes, its "gaze, beyond the bastion, seems to pene- 
trate the very depths of the country. But it is not from 
that side that it should be seen: the right place for a 
view is the chemin de ronde, at the foot of the talus. 
While the artist was working at the head of his Repub- 
lique ... his friends called to him from below: ' Rajoute 
le front, soutiens la joue, avance le menton, remets de la 
neige au bonnet ! ' And the artist, perched on his parapet 

84 






1 ^ 

l ,3fM 

Ml ^w 




mem M 



^^ 



Moulin. La Republique 

Etched by Bracquemond from the bust in snow 

Size of the original etching, 8% X 0* inches 

The New York Public Library 



like a Greek artisan on the summit of a pediment, lis- 
tened to the indications and criticisms till the bust, 
little by little, took on a majestic and terrible beauty." 

IV 

Whether or not either Moulin or Falguiere actually 
made sketches in more permanent material of their 
grandiose conceptions I do not know; but an interesting 
record of them has been preserved in two plates etched 
by Bracquemond. 

"I have a friend," writes Gautier in still another 
tableau, "who also turns to account the leisure of the 
rampart, and who etches with a strange originality the 
barbarous side of war as it appears contrasted with the 
refinements of our modern civilization." 

Doubtless this was Bracquemond, whose own bat- 
talion was stationed at the very bastion, 85, which had 
thus been turned into a veritable Musee de Neige, and 
who was, therefore, presumably Gautier's guide on the 
above occasion. At all events, Bracquemond published 
three years after the war, in 1874, a series of five etch- 
ings dealing with the Siege, numbers four and five of 
which preserve, respectively, the forms of Falguiere's 
La Resistance, and Moulin's bust of La Republique. 
Another, number two, gives a view of Bicetre et les 
Hautes-Bruyeres, par un temps de neige, which we might 
suppose to be the very snowstorm which supplied those 
artists with their material, were it not for the date on the 
plate itself, which places it a month earlier. 

Another etcher, also serving with the National Guard, 
who recorded his pictorial impressions on the copper- 
plate, was Maxime Lalanne. His series, which con- 

85 



tains twelve plates besides a supplementary plate, was 
published under the title, Souvenirs artistiques du siege 
de Paris. 

"C'est egall" exclaims Beraldi cataloguing it. "Le 
siege de Paris aboutissant a des souvenirs ' artistiques, 1 
quel titre, quand on y pense ! " 

One is, perhaps, inclined to agree with Beraldi at 
first. But after all, why not? he concludes on reflection. 
The Souvenirs, which give a very fair idea of the charac- 
ter of Lalanne's sometimes thin, but always distin- 
guished linear technique, are certainly none the worse 
for being artistiques, and constitute a valuable record of 
certain aspects of Paris during the siege. 

They are particularly interesting if studied in conjunc- 
tion with Goncourt's record of impressions preserved in 
the Journal du Siege, for which, it might almost seem 
that they were made as illustrations, so close, very 
often, is the correspondence in the choice of subject, if 
not in the style of treatment. 

This, always heightened and imaginative in Gon- 
court, tends to become literal and matter-of-fact in La- 
lanne. Take, for example, the plate entitled Avenue de 
Boulogne which shows how the superb trees had been 
ruthlessly felled and the stumps sharpened so that the 
pointed stakes would serve as an obstacle to the enemy's 
advance. The impression which Lalanne has given is 
simply that of some ugly llano estacado. Goncourt, on 
the other hand, has been impressed by the way in which 
"these great trees fall under the axe, swaying to and fro 
like men fatally wounded," and, as he views the stakes 
which are like the upturned teeth of some " sinister har- 
row," hate rises in his heart "for these Prussians, who 
bring about such assassinations of nature." 

86 




,g i «m& ic '•- 



Both artists have noted the singular transformation 
of the pretty little Mare d'Auteuil which, "half drained 
by the cattle which kneel to drink among its reeds," 
its banks denuded of their trees and trampled by the 
herds collected here by the commissariat, presents, in 
Lalanne's plate, the appearance of a world returned 
entirely to primal chaos, in whose marshy wastes, once 
peopled plains, the last man sits on a stump fishing for 
his obscene food. 

A similar correspondence is to be noted in their 
rendering of the view, from Point-du-Jour, of the Pont- 
Viaduc, whose arches, " barricaded and closed with 
great wooden cross-beams," as Goncourt describes them, 
supply the classical and somewhat academic Lalanne 
with a striking architectural motive which quite makes 
him forget that his real subject is the siege! 



The supplementary plate in Lalanne's series, Le 
section bastion ^9 et porte Brieu, has an added per- 
sonal interest in that it is dedicated "A notre excellent 
capitaine et ami Cadart, souvenir des gardes de la 8e cie, 
du 8e Bon" 

Cadart, of course, was Lalanne's publisher, as he was 
of so many other French etchers in the second half of the 
last century, when etching had become a popular art, 
and there had grown up a commercial demand for prints. 
Taking advantage of this and of the popularity of the 
subject, Cadart issued a number of sets of etchings 
illustrating the siege and Commune. Among the best 
after Lalanne's — and very much more in the spirit 
of true illustrations than his slight sketches aspired to 

87 



be — were those by Martial (Adolphe Martial Pote- 
ment): he Prussian chez nous, Paris en siege, Paris 
sous le commune, Paris incendie, and several others. 

In connection with these too (though Martial often 
supplies a text of his own either in verse or in prose), as 
well as with the series depicting types and costumes 
etched by Bert all and published with English text in a 
volume entitled The Communists of Paris, one should 
read Goncourt's Journal, which records more than one 
exciting adventure, often in the company of his friends, 
Bracquemond and Burty. Bracquemond, still liable for 
military duty, and afraid of being drafted into the 
National Guard at the orders of the Commune, joined 
the medical staff as a hospital helper, while Burty's 
house, one of Goncourt's headquarters in Paris, was 
directly in the line of march of the troops of the Re- 
publique from Versailles and so an excellent, if some- 
what hazardous, vantage point for the observation of 

1 For a new generation of print-lovers, it may be interesting to note 
what the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton had to say of this etcher who 
was once regarded as one of the masters of his art in Paris. 

"The technical skill of Martial is extraordinary," writes Hamerton, 
after praising his enormous industry, "and a few years ago, before 
skill in etching became more general in France, he had scarcely an 
equal in this kind of ability. For example, Martial would go to a gal- 
lery of pictures and make sketches there in his note-book, and after- 
wards go home and take several large plates of copper, and write on 
the copper an account of the pictures, and illustrate it as he went on 
by many sketches of them etched in the text, feeling quite sure that 
every one of the sketches would be successful. . . . Many another feat 
of cleverness has he accomplished. . . . His two best qualities are a 
brilliantly clear conception of facts, and perfect manual skill. He has 
no creative imagination, nor any tenderness; and therefore his work, 
though always admirable, can never be charming; never have any 
hold upon the heart. But notwithstanding this restriction, it is emi- 
nently valuable work in its own way, and future students of the his- 
tory of Paris will be, or ought to be, very grateful for it." Martial's 
collection of etchings of old Paris contains no less than three hundred 
plates, exclusive of those included in numerous series such as I have 
mentioned, and his Salons. 

88 




Martial. Arms of the City of Paris 

(Plate suppressed by the Government) 

Size of the original etching, 16% X 15 inches 

The New York Public Library 



fierce street-fighting from behind barricades on the 
Boulevard. 

Once Goncourt went with Burty to call on the great 
Dutch artist, Jongkind, who had gone on quietly living 
in one of the more remote quarters all through the insur- 
rection. 

"I was one of the first to appreciate the painter/' 
writes Goncourt, "but I had not previously met the 
man himself. Imagine a big blond devil of a fellow, with 
eyes of Delft blue, and a mouth whose corners droop, 
painting away in a knitted waistcoat, and with a Dutch 
sailor's cap on his head. 

"He has, on his easel, a picture of a Parisian banlieu, 
with a loamy bank represented by a delicious scrawl. 
He shows us sketches of the streets of Paris, of the Quar- 
tier Mouffetard, of the approaches to Saint-Medard, 
where the enchantment of the gray and mottled colors 
of the Paris plaster seems to have been surprised by a 
magician, in a radiant aqueous atmosphere. 

"Then there are, in the card-board boxes, scribbled 
sketches on paper, phantasmagorias of sky and of 
water, the fireworks-like colorations of the ether. 

"He shows us all this bonifacement, talking a patois of 
Dutch and French through which pierces at times the 
bitterness of a great talent — of a very great talent — 
which requires but 3,000 francs a year, and has not 
always been able to earn even that small amount in 
order to live. . . . But immediately, his manner soften- 
ing once more, he speaks, with sadness, of his art, of his 
struggle, of his constant striving, which renders him, 
he says, the unhappiest of men. 

"In the meantime, there hovers about him, with the 
caressing words mothers have for their children, a short 

89 



woman, with silver locks and with thick moustaches — 
an angel of devotion who looks like a vivandiere of the 
Imperial 'Old Guard.' 

"The seance is long. The examination of the boxes 
has lasted several hours. Jongkind talks much. He 
grows animated on the subject of the politics of the 
Commune. Suddenly his speech is confused, grows more 
Dutch, his words become bizarre, incoherent. ... He 
begins to babble of the agents of Louis XVII, of horrible 
things he claims to have seen. He jumps up, as if moved 
by a spring. 'Look, an electric current has just passed 
me!' and he whistles to imitate the sound of a rifle- 
ball " 

VI 

The two friends also called, at the H6tel-de-Ville, on 
Verlaine, who had become involved in the Commune 
through weakness and, as it were, almost against his 
own will. He told Goncourt and Burty that he had had to 
combat a proposition on the part of the insurrectionists 
for the destruction of Notre-Dame. 

This was after the destruction of the Vendome column, 
one of the most celebrated incidents of the Commune, 
to which, however, and to the part played in it by the 
painter, Gustave Courbet, Goncourt makes but a pass- 
ing reference. Others have told the singular story, the 
latest being Mr. Ernest A. Vizetelly, an eyewitness, in 
a recent volume of reminiscences. 1 

"Gustave Courbet," he writes, "peasant-like in ap- 
pearance, puffed out with beer, good-humored, simple- 
minded, and yet very conceited, was one of the curiosi- 

1 My Adventures in the Commune, by Ernest Vizetelly. New York: 
Duffield & Co., 1915. 

90 



ties of the Commune. How a great artist, such as he 
was, could have consented to join the band of the Hotel- 
de-Ville, amazed many of his contemporaries. The 
story that he positively hated the Vendome column and 
became a member of the Commune for the one express 
purpose of seeing it pulled down, is merely a foolish 
legend, and one may assume that foolish vanity alone 
led Courbet to accept the honor thrust upon him." 

And yet, as Mr. Vizetelly himself proceeds to show, it 
is undoubtedly true that the destruction of this monu- 
ment to Napoleon and "Csesarism" had long been a 
mania with Courbet, who hated the Second Empire to 
such an extent that he had even refused to accept the 
decoration of the Legion of Honor at the hand of the 
Emperor. 

"At the time of the German siege of Paris/' writes 
Vizetelly, " Courbet proposed that the column should be 
pulled down and melted in conjunction with all the 
French and German guns of the period, with the view of 
erecting with the metal a new and gigantic monument 
which should be dedicated to universal peace and repub- 
licanism. Naturally, that Utopian idea found few sup- 
porters even among the French, and certainly none on 
the side of Bismarck's 'big battalions.' At the Com- 
mune's sitting on April 2, however, both Courbet and 
J. B. Clement complained of the delay in pulling down 
the column, whereupon they were assured by Paschal 
Grousset and Andrieu that it was only a matter of a few 
days, and that the work had been entrusted to two engin- 
eers of ability who had assumed all responsibility for 
the undertaking. May 5 was the next date fixed for the 
demolition, but it went by without anything being done, 
and the Commune thereupon declared that there should 



be a fine of 500 francs for each day's delay, the amount 
to be deducted from the original contract price for the 
demolition, which was no less than 36,000 francs." 

Finally it was announced officially that the column 
would fall at two o'clock in the afternoon of May 16. 

"Long before the appointed hour, the Rue de la Paix 
was a sea of heads. . . . We were all there — either in 
the Rue de la Paix, or the Rue de Castiglione or in some 
side street whence a glimpse of the column could be 
obtained. I myself, my father and my brother Arthur 
were in the Rue de la Paix. Every balcony there was 
crowded, heads peeped out of every window, and no 
little anxiety was blended with the general excitement, 
for there might be some havoc should the column collide 
in its fall with one or another building." 

The long wait was beguiled by the music of bands and 
the appearance of gaudily dressed and gold-braided of- 
ficials on the balcony of the Ministry of Justice. At length 
the capstans began to work. 

"But all at once there came a strange, strident sound. 
Did it emanate from the column? Everybody became 
nervous, anxious, excited. Was there going to be an 
accident — perhaps a disaster? No ! only one of the 
cables fixed to the summit of the column had snapped. 
That, unfortunately, meant a further delay, and, in fact, 
nearly two hours elapsed before everything was made 
right again. Meantime we were regaled with more ' Mar- 
seillaise,' more 'Chant du Depart,' more 'Chant des 
Girondins.' According to my watch (as noted in my 
diary) operations only became effective at a quarter- 
past five o'clock. Even then the capstans performed 
their work very slowly, and the half-hour was reached 
before the column really began to oscillate. Swiftly, 

92 







mt *, 



11,1*41 ^5?- ■Mlwwt. <m VvaJw 




'"9 



iwi i t/.WjpaiX aw. toaXow, Dm> pv)wXi/&t/>.- ' 

■ ifioit qwCqwA joima aw. swl qui mXuws, 

SJSS au. vicm, ~ik i Wwuvul limit l>u Uu {vjvl>> '. 

3eg|i iSA cptt> "St jKmmMjj. jtua wt&u.. D&u/l (ewt , wtaiwwit jw& 

ia. coCoiwbL'bt ta ptau. Ue*Dowm ett io&dwftwtf. cwwbmw 
s= V wuJxrX vw^t aw> , a uau. tpoqu*. oa. to. qwm. <&M»t 
ums. f/xUx_ , <Y«)Y| w,vj iyia/.e/wu/mX wi. u/vu_ Iwu/vuc , fc'awwib 

I?wii(w,« a Iw.u. IxXjl a. XoujtsU, &«, awvww 
"? i£uACpt~ ._ (*£tsL ootowwc tatfeljait Dc ia_ 

\LLVcMAa 3e 




Martial. La Colonne de la Place Vendome 

From "Paris sous la Commune" 

Size of the original etching, 9% X 6*4 inches 

The New York Public Library 



however, came the sequel. In another instant the great 
pile was bending in our direction. Some of the lower 
plates of bronze had been removed and some of the 
masonry, just above the pedestal, cut to a certain depth. 
. . . A great bed of fascines, sand, and manure had been 
prepared for the reception of the lofty pile. It came 
down in its entirety . . . until a certain angle was 
reached. Then, all at once, it split into three sections, 
and in that wise fell upon the bed prepared for it. There 
was a loud thud. Particles of manure and sand arose, 
cloud-like, and were carried hither and thither. The 
ground trembled beneath one, houses shook, windows 
rattled, but there was no damage. 

" As the dust cleared away, I perceived Glais-Bizoin, 
one of Gambetta's coadjutors during the war in the 
provinces, standing on the column's pedestal, waving 
his hat, with a queer smile upon his punchinello face. 
Near him stood ' General ' Bergeret and several guards, 
waving large red flags. Loud were the shouts of ' Vive la 
Commune ! ' Right quickly did one of the Guards' bands 
strike up the 'Marseillaise,' but amidst and above it I 
suddenly heard the strains of 'Hail, Columbia:' played 
violently on a piano by some Yankee girl belonging to a 
party of Americans who had installed themselves on the 
first floor of the Hotel Mirabeau. They came out on to 
the balcony and were loud in their plaudits. In those 
days the cult of Napoleon had no disciples in the United 
States. Both New Yorkists [sic] and Bostonians knew 
but one hero — the George Washington, who, unlike 
Napoleon, never lied." 

Courbet was one of the committee appointed to super- 
intend the removal of valuable books and works of art 
from the house of M. Thiers, which was likewise demol- 

93 



ished, and their distribution among the public museums 
and libraries. These were all deposited in the Tuileries, 
however, where they are said to have perished when 
that palace was consumed by the flames. 

About this same time there occurred a serious split in 
the Communists' ranks, and Courbet was among those 
who signed a protest complaining that the Commune 
had abandoned all direct responsibility and thrown to 
the winds its original policy of political and social re- 
form. The signatories threatened that they would no 
longer attend the deliberations of the Commune, and 
were accused of wishing to save their own skins in the 
great crisis that was now felt to be at hand. 

Courbet's attitude in these latter days, as well as his 
great fame as an artist, may, indeed, have had some 
effect in ameliorating the judgment passed upon him 
by the courtmartial at the end of the Commune. Though 
a number of his fellow-prisoners were condemned to 
transportation, deportation, or hard labor for life, 
Courbet was sentenced to only six months' imprison- 
ment and the payment of a fine of 1500 francs. His 
last years were spent in Switzerland, where he died in 
1877. The monument, in whose demolition he had been 
the leading spirit, was afterwards restored. 










VII 

COROT AS A LITHOGRAPHER 

I 

N the preceding chapter, I wrote of the 
French artists who remained in Paris dur- 
ing the Siege, and who, in many instances, 
as members of the National Guard or of 
the Mobiles, bore an active part in the defence of the 
capital. 

The list, though it included Puvis de Chavannes, 
Courbet, Regnault, Bracquemond, Lalanne, and others, 
was far from complete. For example, I made no men- 
tion of Corot. Yet, during the fateful winter of 1870- 
71, there was in the beleaguered city no more helpful 
or patriotic spirit than that of the great lyric landscape 
artist who expressed his apocalyptic sense of events in 
the strange, visionary painting, so unlike the rest of his 
work, Paris Incendiee. 

Though seventy-five years old, Corot not only re- 
fused to leave Paris while there was yet time, but even 
bought a rifle in order to take his place on the ram- 
parts. When he saw that he was not strong enough for 
this, he found other forms of useful activity. If he could 
not give himself, he could at least give his art for the 
Fatherland. So he worked away with redoubled energy, 
selling his pictures, and employing the considerable 

95 



sums obtained in this way to relieve in some measure 
the horrors of the Siege. 

"He went among the ambulances and hospitals," we 
are told by one writer, M. Geffroy, " emptying his hands 
and his pockets," and at one time he sent a large sum 
to the authorities with a note expressing the wish that 
it might be employed for "the manufacture of the can- 
non required to drive the Prussians out of the woods 
of Ville d'Avray." Then, later, he sent ten thousand 
francs for "the liberation of the country" and refused 
to take it back when the war was over. Instead, with 
characteristic compassion and generosity, he ordered 
it turned over to the poor of the tenth arrondisse- 
ment. 

Even when Paris had capitulated and the Siege was 
raised, Corot was loth to leave the capital, and might 
have remained to experience all the added horrors of 
the Commune, had it not been for the entreaties of his 
friend and future cataloguer, M. Alfred Robaut, who 
came down from Douai and persuaded the old painter 
to return with him to his home in the North. 

Robaut was the son-in-law of that provincial painter 
of Arras, Constant Dutilleux, who, in 1847, while yet 
unknown to Corot, — and while Corot himself was yet 
unknown to the world at large, — wrote the latter 
expressing profound admiration for his art. Dutilleux 
remained, to the day of his death, in 1867, the faithful 
friend and humble disciple of the great artist, whom 
he taught one thing at least — how to make cliches- 
verres. He had, indeed, two major passions in his 
obscure and laborious life — Corot and Delacroix — 
and both of these were shared to the fullest extent by 
Robaut. 

96 






"V 



K 




Corot. Le Clocher de St. Nicolas-Lez-Arras 

Size of the original lithograph, 11 X 8% inches 

In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 



The latter's father had been a skilful designer. He 
himself grew up surrounded by lithographic presses, 
and early served his apprenticeship in the art of draw- 
ing on the stone. What more natural, therefore, than 
that he should place a lithographic crayon between the 
fingers of his distinguished guest, and encourage him 
to make a number of drawings on autographic paper? 

Corot, it is said, liked the freedom of handling which 
the medium permitted; and, evenings, when the day's 
painting was done, the old artist gave rein to his ima- 
gination and fancy. He made altogether thirteen de- 
signs in this way in the spring of 1871, and they were 
carefully transferred to the stone by Robaut himself, 
who, in 1872, arranged for the publication of twelve, 
the thirteenth, Sous Bois, being merely a preliminary 
experiment in the handling of the medium. Fifty copies 
only were issued of this set, which is to-day one of the 
rarest treasures of French black-and-white art in the 
nineteenth century. 1 

i Cover: DOUZE CROQUIS & DESSINS ORIGINAUX sur 

-papier Autographique par COROT — tires a Cinquante Exemplaires. 
— Numero . . . figne [sic] de VAuteur — Paris. Rue Lafayette No. 113, 
Rue Bonaparte No. 18, a la Librairie artistique et chez les principaux 
Marchands d'Estampes. — Imp. Lemercier & Cie, rue de Seine, 57, 
Paris. 

Translation of the notice printed on an inside leaf: — 

"We offer to admirers of M. Corot's art, so much appreciated to- 
day, a hitherto unpublished collection of twelve sketches and compo- 
sitions drawn by him on autographic paper, and transferred by us 
directly to the stone. 

"One thus has before him the work of the Master, just as it came 
from his hand, and we beg to lay stress on this point; for, in the work 
of an artist like M. Corot, there is always an elusive element of poetry 
that no alien crayon can possibly render. 

"After having remained in Paris throughout the Siege, M. Corot 
came North in April, 1871, to rest. Both at Arras and at Douai he 
made studies and even painted some important pictures, while from 
time to time, for the sake of varying his work, he produced, with his 

97 



As a matter of fact, these autographs were by no 
means Corot's first essays in the field of lithography. 
While yet a young man, in the establishment of M. 
Delalain, the cloth-merchant, and before he had re- 
ceived the slightest training as an artist, he made at 
least three designs on the stone. Of them no trace re- 
mains, even in the Bibliotheque Nationale, although 
the stationer, Collas, at whose shop in the Passage Fey- 
deau the prints were shown, was supposed to have 
deposited there the three copies required by law; but 
Corot roughly sketched two from memory for Robaut, 
who reproduced them in their proper sequence in his 
monumental catalogue. With true Boswellian frugality 
and prudent foresight, the latter also carefully pre- 
served the crumbs of comment with which they were 
accompanied in the making. 

"Oh, how ugly and awkward that must have been!" 
Corot exclaimed, as he made the sketch of The Plague 
at Barcelona, which shows a Spanish peasant, covered 
with a great cape, seated in the foreground of a deso- 
late, fever-stricken landscape. "For, you know," he 

usual imaginative fecundity, the compositions and sketches which we 
have collected and published in an edition limited to fifty numbered 
copies. 

"We are confident that these expressions, however hasty at times, 
of the thought of the Master, will be appreciated by collectors and 
artists. For this reason we have not wished to make any selection, 
believing that admirers of the work of M. Corot will be grateful to us 
for furnishing even the slightest sketches of such a painter, in their 
frank and spontaneous execution. Those who have been privileged to 
meet and know him, will recognize in them the echo, as it were, of his 
always varied and delightful conversation. 

"Some of these drawings are, moreover, very finely executed, the 
great artist having lavished every care on them. They contain there- 
fore much of the charm of his incomparable paintings. 

"Paris, September, 1872." 

The set owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is No. 31. 

98 



m 




CORttT- 



Corot. Le Dormoir des V aches 

Size of the original lithograph, 6% X 5% inches 

In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 



continued, "I was absolutely ignorant of my trade, 
and had no leisure to learn it. I was still living with M. 
Delalain, and it was only at night I escaped to carry 
my stones to Engelman" — one of the three great 
lithographic printers and publishers in Paris at that 
period, when the new art, invented or discovered by 
the Bavarian Senef elder, was carried to its very zenith 
by such artists as Isabey, Harding, and Bonington. 

Another of these crude early compositions, inspired, 
no doubt, by either Charlet or Raffet, was called The 
Old Guard Dies but Never Surrenders. 

"I recall," said Corot, as his pencil ran rapidly over 
the paper, "that I had backed my grenadier up against 
a tree ... in his arms he held his flag, resolved to aban- 
don it only with his death. ... I see him again with 
his great coat and gaiters. . . . Before him, three to 
one, the English threatened him with their bayonets." 

The recollection of recent humiliations to the French 
arms (this was in 1873) led him to add: "To-day it 
would be possible to make a sad counterpart of this 
drawing; but let us not dwell too much upon this fact, 
and let us console ourselves with nature." 

Of a third lithograph, Une Fete de Village, Corot him- 
self could recall nothing more, after an interval of half 
a century, than the title and the fact that the composi- 
tion contained a large number of figures. 



II 



As an acolyte of business, Corot was hardly a success. 
It is said that he was forced to leave the first establish- 
ment where his father placed him, because he soiled the 
fabrics with his paint-stained fingers. Having shown 

99 



not the slightest aptitude for salesmanship in his second 
place, he was finally set to work outside the establish- 
ment, carrying heavy packages through the streets. 
But he was equally a failure in this department. More 
than once his employer, M. Delalain, came across him 
either loitering along and looking up at the clouds, or 
else standing before the shops in whose windows prints 
and other pictures were displayed, as one may see in 
Carl Vernet's cover sketch for an album issued by 
Delpech — another of the great lithographic publishers 
of the period, like Engelman. 

Every one knows how, finally, in 1822, Corot's father 
consented to his son's abandoning the mercantile career 
he had marked out for him, and becoming an artist. 
The young man immediately entered the studio of 
Michallon, and thereafter, wrapped up in his painting, 
he apparently quite forgot the humbler medium in 
which he had made his obscure debut as an original 
artist. Only once before 1871 did he, so far as is known, 
again touch a lithographic crayon, and that was merely 
to make a cover for a little brochure, La Caisse 
d'Epargne, a vaudeville, both words and music of which 
were written by the sons of Corot's old patron, M. 
Delalain. It represented Madame Rose in the role of 
Mere Boisseau, at the Thedtre-Comte, in 1836, and of 
this work Robaut possessed a unique example. 

In 1845 Corot's interest in Charles Jacque's experi- 
ments with the needle led him to etch a plate, the 
Souvenir de Toscane, and later, urged by his friends 
Bracquemond, Michelin, and others, he made a dozen 
or so delightful etchings which, in spite of many evi- 
dent shortcomings, succeed to an extraordinary degree 
in expressing the most poetic aspects of Corot's genius. 

100 






But though, of the two, lithography would, on the 
whole, have seemed much the more sympathetic 
medium, it remained neglected by him for nearly half 
a century. 

According to Mr. Joseph Pennell, Corot's lithographs 
or autographs, like those of so many other contempo- 
rary painters who made occasional use of transfer paper, 
"reveal no appreciation of the lithographic quality, 
and are precisely like his drawings in other mediums." 
What he means, doubtless, is that neither Corot, Cour- 
bet, Jacque, nor Millet, ever availed himself of the 
full resources of the lithographic art. They did not, 
like its pioneer exploiters, seek to perform feats of 
amazing virtuosity, to rival oil painting in its own field 
with wonderful effects of tone and color. But it is diffi- 
cult to see how, as far as they went, they used it any 
less idiomatically than their predecessors. 

" The lithographs of Corot are particularly delightful," 
writes M. Loys Delteil, who has compiled a catalogue 
of the artist's black-and-white work in he Peintre 
Graveur Illustre. " They express in the highest degree 
the qualities of charm, style, and naive skill charac- 
teristic of Corot. On lithographic transfer paper (papier 
caique autographique) , the master felt more at ease than 
on copper or on glass; consequently he was able to give 
free rein to his imagination, based as it was on pro- 
found knowledge, and put into practice the maxim in- 
scribed in one of his notebooks: "lam never in a hurry 
about detail; the masses and the character of a pic- 
ture interest me before everything. When it is well 
planned out, I seek the subtleties both of form and of 
colour." 



101 



Ill 

What, perhaps, first strikes one in examining these 
lithographs, is their variety — even their marked diver- 
sity of manner. Some, like Le Clocher de St. Nicolas- 
lez- Arras and Le Repos des Philosophes, are compara- 
tively finished drawings. Others, like La Tour Isolee, 
executed with pen and ink instead of with lithographic 
crayon, and Sous Bois, Corot's first attempt on auto- 
graphic paper, are little more than casual scrawls, though 
they convey with sure science precisely what the artist 
sought to express. 

And the subject-matter is as diverse as the style of 
handling. Glimpses of the level, clean-washed, wind- 
swept north country where Corot was almost as much 
at home as in the woods of Ville d'Avray, alternate 
with reminiscences of that Italian land which never 
ceased to allure, linking him, the modern Frenchman, 
subtle interpreter of the very soul of nature, so unmis- 
takably with the classic Claude Lorrain — himself 
naturalist and romantic nature-lover in his own day. 
Finally there are those pure and poetic evocations of 
the remote pagan past, such as Sapho and Le Repos 
des Philosophes, in which the imaginative side of his 
curiously double and composite art fought free of fact 
and found complete, untrammelled expression. 

Whatever its theme or its treatment, there is not one 
of these lithographs that has not its own peculiar beauty, 
or at least suggestion of loveliness. This, naturally, is not 
to say that some are not better than others, or that there 
are not even comparative failures in the group. In the 
Sapho, for example, the lines of the composition, as 

102 




Corot. Le Repos des Philosophes 

Size of the original lithograph, 8 9 /ie X 5m e inches 

In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 




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well as the lack of detail and of contrast between the 
dark tones of the foliage and foreground, produce a 
heavy effect, and the drawing of the figure is unfortu- 
nate. Le Cavalier dans les Roseaux also seems a trifle 
empty and awkward. But such exceptions serve merely 
to bring into higher relief the charming qualities of the 
series as a whole. 

The most satisfactory drawings are not, necessarily, 
in every instance the most completely finished. Le 
Clocher de St. Nicolas-lez- Arras and Le Repos des Philo- 
sophes will doubtless please those for whom Corot's 
etchings are too summary and abstract. Some, however, 
will prefer certain others, such as Saules et Peupliers 
Blancs, Le Moulin de Cuincy, and even Le Coup de 
Vent (so suggestive of a picture with the same title 
painted several years before) where the method is more 
direct and evocative, as in the etchings themselves. 

It is a commonplace to say that Corot is even 
more a poet than a painter — that he is concerned far 
more with the spirit than with the surface and texture 
of things, with the interpretation of certain aspects of 
nature which occur over and over again in all his work 
till they combine to form, as it were, a sort of melodic 
accompaniment to it, than with their sheer represen- 
tative power. Yet this does not indicate any lack of 
a firm grip on the facts, or any uncertainty in their 
rendering. He is at times a master of delicate and 
expressive draughtsmanship. Take, for example, Saules 
et Peupliers Blancs. Who else could so simply yet 
subtly suggest the feathery lightness of pollard willows 
whose tops, a glamour of misty gray-green in the 
bright spring and summer breezes, Corot has rendered 
with that soft yet free sweep of his crayon which is at 

103 



once an enchantment and a caress? And where could 
one find fresher observation or firmer rendering of the 
larger tree-forms than in Le Moulin de Cuincy f 

This last print is particularly pleasing with its reflec- 
tions on the water, its filmy clouds, its white-walled 
mill, and its suggestion of peasant figures in the fore- 
ground. Without being carried quite so far as some 
of the others, even more is suggested, and the whole 
scene seems bathed in the tender, limpid atmosphere 
of early spring, when the skies grow dreamy and the bare 
trees begin to show the first faint signs of sap stirring 
in their branches. 

Both Le Dormoir des Vetches and Souvenir d'ltalie 
are also remarkably beautiful drawings, especially the 
latter, which, in the way three trees of different shape 
and size fill the space opened against the sky by a steeply 
descending Italian hillside, offers one of the artist's 
effective and characteristic compositions. 



IV 



Between 1871 and 1874 Corot executed three other 
lithographs on autographic paper. Among these the 
most attractive perhaps is Souvenir de Sologne. This 
piece, which originally appeared in another, miscella- 
neous, publication, 1 is not reproduced in Robaut's 
catalogue, where it is indicated as a cliche-verre trans- 
ferred to the stone. 

" Would it not be more accurate to call it a drawing 

1 V Album contemporain, collection des dessins et croquis des meil- 
leurs artistes de noire epoque — ouvrage publie sous le patronage des 
maitres contemporains — premiere serie de 25 planches. Prix 15 jr., 
en vente au siege de la Societe Ichnographique, boulevard St. Mi- 
chel, 85. 

104 




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executed directly on prepared paper and then trans- 
ferred?" asks M. Delteil, who answers his own question 
in the affirmative. However this may be, the execution 
is quite different from that of any of the other auto- 
graphs, and its finer, lighter, and tighter linework is 
certainly closer to that of the cliches-verres, and even 
of the etchings, than of the consummate freedom and 
ease of Corot's sweeping crayon stroke, in the drawings 
I have already mentioned. 

Instead of criticizing such drawings and finding them 
deficient in "lithographic quality," one wishes that 
Corot had made many more in the same medium, and 
that all had been issued in much larger editions. For 
now the few that he did make are almost hopelessly 
out of the reach of the collector, while no photographic 
reproduction can give any adequate idea of their charm. 



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